학술논문

White matter tract alterations in schizophrenia identified by DTI-based probabilistic tractography: a multisite harmonisation study.
Document Type
Academic Journal
Author
Jo YT; Department of Psychiatry, Kangdong Sacred Heart Hospital, Hallym University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea.; Joo SW; Department of Psychiatry, Asan Medical Center, University of Ulsan College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea.; Choi W; Department of Psychiatry, Asan Medical Center, University of Ulsan College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea.; Joe S; Brain Laboratory in the Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA.; Lee J; Department of Psychiatry, Asan Medical Center, University of Ulsan College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea.
Source
Publisher: Cambridge University Press Country of Publication: England NLM ID: 9612501 Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1601-5215 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 09242708 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Acta Neuropsychiatr Subsets: MEDLINE
Subject
Language
English
Abstract
Introduction: It has been suggested that schizophrenia involves dysconnectivity between functional brain regions and also the white matter structural disorganisation. Thus, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has widely been used for studying schizophrenia. However, most previous studies have used the region of interest (ROI) based approach. We, therefore, performed the probabilistic tractography method in this study to reveal the alterations of white matter tracts in the schizophrenia brain.
Methods: A total of four different datasets consisted of 189 patients with schizophrenia and 213 healthy controls were investigated. We performed retrospective harmonisation of raw diffusion MRI data by dMRIharmonisation and used the FMRIB Software Library (FSL) for probabilistic tractography. The connectivities between different ROIs were then compared between patients and controls. Furthermore, we evaluated the relationship between the connection probabilities and the symptoms and cognitive measures in patients with schizophrenia.
Results: After applying Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons, 11 different tracts showed significant differences between patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. Many of these tracts were associated with the basal ganglia or cortico-striatal structures, which aligns with the current literature highlighting striatal dysfunction. Moreover, we found that these tracts demonstrated statistically significant relationships with few cognitive measures related to language, executive function, or processing speed.
Conclusion: We performed probabilistic tractography using a large, harmonised dataset of diffusion MRI data, which enhanced the statistical power of our study. It is important to note that most of the tracts identified in this study, particularly callosal and cortico-striatal streamlines, have been previously implicated in schizophrenia within the current literature. Further research with harmonised data focusing specifically on these brain regions could be recommended.