Sub-hubs of baseline functional brain networks are related to early improvement following two-week pharmacological therapy for major depressive disorder

Abstract

Accumulating evidence suggests that early improvement after two-week antidepressant treatment is predictive of later outcomes of patients with major depressive disorder (MDD); however, whether this early improvement is associated with baseline neural architecture remains largely unknown. Utilizing resting-state functional MRI data and graph-based network approaches, this study calculated voxel-wise degree centrality maps for 24 MDD patients at baseline and linked them with changes in the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAMD) scores after two weeks of medication. Six clusters exhibited significant correlations of their baseline degree centrality with treatment-induced HAMD changes for the patients, which were mainly categorized into the posterior default-mode network (i.e., the left precuneus, supramarginal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and right angular gyrus) and frontal regions. Receiver operating characteristic curve and logistic regression analyses convergently revealed excellent performance of these regions in discriminating the early improvement status for the patients, especially the angular gyrus (sensitivity and specificity of 100%). Moreover, the angular gyrus was identified as the optimal regressor as determined by stepwise regression. Interestingly, these regions possessed higher centrality than others in the brain (P < 10(-3)) although they were not the most highly connected hubs. Finally, we demonstrate a high reproducibility of our findings across several factors (e.g., threshold choice, anatomical distance, and temporal cutting) in our analyses. Together, these preliminary exploratory analyses demonstrate the potential of neuroimaging-based network analysis in predicting the early therapeutic improvement of MDD patients and have important implications in guiding earlier personalized therapeutic regimens for possible treatment-refractory depression.

Prediction of Biological Motion Perception Performance from Intrinsic Brain Network Regional Efficiency

“…A functional template (i.e., 160 regions of interest) from a previous meta-analysis study (Dosenbach et al, 2010) was used to define the nodes of the functional network. The template covers the cerebral cortex, subcortical structures, and the cerebellum, and has been widely used in previous studies (Xue et al, 2011; Hwang et al, 2013; Shen et al, 2015). To define the edge weight of the brain weighted network, we extracted the time series of all voxels within each node and then averaged them to obtain the mean time series.…”

“…The networks differed in the number of edges (i.e., correlation matrix) (Wen et al, 2011; Shen et al, 2015). Thus, we applied a range of sparsity thresholds, defined as the fraction of the total number of edges remaining in a network, so every graph had the same number of edges (Watts and Strogatz, 1998; Wen et al, 2011; Shen et al, 2015; Suo et al, 2015).…”

“…The networks differed in the number of edges (i.e., correlation matrix) (Wen et al, 2011; Shen et al, 2015). Thus, we applied a range of sparsity thresholds, defined as the fraction of the total number of edges remaining in a network, so every graph had the same number of edges (Watts and Strogatz, 1998; Wen et al, 2011; Shen et al, 2015; Suo et al, 2015). The minimum sparsity was set so that the averaged node degree of the network with threshold was 2log( N ), where N was the number of nodes, and the small-worldness scalar of the network was >1.1 (Wen et al, 2011; Shen et al, 2015; Suo et al, 2015).…”

Molecular, Functional, and Structural Imaging of Major Depressive Disorder

“…Interestingly, networks may show abnormal functional connectivity to the same brain nodes, which further adds our understanding of the concomitant symptoms of MDD patients. Meanwhile, altered functional connectivity values detected by resting-state fMRI have been used to evaluate the therapeutic effect of a diversity of treatments on MDD, such as specific pharmacological treatments, psychological treatment, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and electroconvulsive shock therapy [79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86]. To date, pharmacotherapy is still the dominant method for patients with MDD.…”

Non redundant functional brain connectivity in schizophrenia

“…These voxel based network methods have been latter applied to study connectivity abnormalities in several psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia (Cole et al 2011;Anticevic et al 2015), bipolar disorder (Anticevic et al 2013), major depressive disorder (Shen et al 2015), obsessive compulsive disorder (Anticevic et al 2014b; J. M. Hou et al 2014;Gottlich et al 2015) and borderline personality disorder (Salvador et al 2014).…”