孤独症谱系障碍患者脑区功能复杂度变化及其与预测脑龄的关系

Alterations in functional complexity of brain regions in autism spectrum disorder patients and correlations with the predicted brain age

目的观察孤独症谱系障碍(ASD)患者脑区功能复杂度变化及其与预测脑龄的关系。方法下载93例ASD患者及96名正常发育青少年(健康人)脑静息态功能MRI(rs-fMRI)公开数据,利用自行研制的虚拟数字脑软件提取脑区功能复杂度;分析ASD患者脑区功能复杂度改变及其与年龄的相关性。分别以65例ASD患者及67名健康人为训练集训练2个预测脑龄网络,以另28例ASD患者及29名健康人为测试集预测脑龄并比较预测误差。结果相比健康人,ASD患者自动解剖标记(AAL)模板中的左侧楔前叶、左侧楔叶和右侧海马旁回基于香农熵的功能复杂度明显减弱而左侧楔叶和右侧小脑CrusⅡ区基于排列熵的功能复杂度明显增强;左侧海马基于Pearson相关系数的功能复杂度减弱而左侧颞中叶基于Pearson相关系数的功能复杂度增强。ASD患者脑区功能复杂度与年龄的相关性有限(|r|均<0.4)。以训练后全连接网络预测测试集ASD患者及健康人的脑龄均低于实际年龄,但二者预测误差差异无统计学意义(P=0.283)。结论ASD患者部分脑区功能存在功能复杂度改变;基于所获全连接网络预测的ASD患者脑龄偏低,但其脑区功能复杂度变化对此无显著影响。

Objective To observe the alterations in functional complexity of brain regions in autism spectrum disorder(ASD)patients and correlations with the predicted brain age.Methods Open brain resting-state functional MRI(rs-MRI)data of 93 ASD patients and 96 typically developing adolescents(healthy subjects)were downloaded.The functional complexity in brain regions were extracted with self-developed virtual digital brain software,and the alterations in functional complexity of brain regions in ASD patients and correlations with their ages were analyzed.Two networks were prospectively trained with data of 65 ASD patients and 67 healthy subjects as the training set to predict brain age,and the results were evaluated,and the predicting errors were compared using test set,i.e.the other 28 ASD patients and 29 healthy subjects.Results Compared to healthy subjects,on the basis of anatomical automatic labeling(AAL)atlas,ASD patients exhibited significantly reduced functional complexity based on Shannon entropy in the left precuneus,left cuneus and right parahippocampal gyrus.Conversely,functional complexity of ASD patients based on permutation entropy significantly increased in the left cuneus and right cerebellar CrusⅡregion.The left hippocampus showed reduced functional complexity based on Pearson correlation coefficient,while the left middle temporal gyrus showed increased functional complexity based on Pearson correlation coefficient.The functional complexity in brain regions of ASD patients were not closely correlated with ages(all|r|<0.4).According to the trained fully connected network,the predicted brain ages of ASD patients and healthy subjects in test set were all lower than their physiological ages,but no significant difference was found between the prediction errors of ASD patients and healthy subjects(P=0.283).Conclusion Functional complexity changed in some brain region functions in ASD patients.The predicted brain ages of ASD patients based on the obtained fully connected network were on the low side,but not obviously affected by the alterations of functional complexity in brain regions.