Regional Abnormality of Functional Connectivity Is Associated with Clinical Manifestations in Individuals with Intractable Focal
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www.nature.com/scientificreports OPEN Regional abnormality of functional connectivity is associated with clinical manifestations in individuals with intractable focal epilepsy Yasuo Nakai1*, Hiroki Nishibayashi1, Tomohiro Donishi2, Masaki Terada3, Naoyuki Nakao1 & Yoshiki Kaneoke2 We explored regional functional connectivity alterations in intractable focal epilepsy brains using resting-state functional MRI. Distributions of the network parameters (corresponding to degree and eigenvector centrality) measured at each brain region for all 25 patients were signifcantly diferent from age- and sex-matched control data that were estimated by a healthy control dataset (n = 582, 18–84 years old). The number of abnormal regions whose parameters exceeded the mean + 2 SD of age- and sex-matched data for each patient were associated with various clinical parameters such as the duration of illness and seizure severity. Furthermore, abnormal regions for each patient tended to have functional connections with each other (mean ± SD = 58.6 ± 20.2%), the magnitude of which was negatively related to the quality of life. The abnormal regions distributed within the default mode network with signifcantly higher probability (p < 0.05) in 7 of 25 patients. We consider that the detection of abnormal regions by functional connectivity analysis using a large number of control datasets is useful for the numerical assessment of each patient’s clinical conditions, although further study is necessary to elucidate etiology-specifc abnormalities. Approximately 25% of epilepsy patients are medically intractable 1. For these patients, various types of brain surgeries have been performed to improve their quality of life (QOL) by reducing seizure frequency2. However, long-term outcomes, such as the seizure freedom rate, have been stagnating, and treatment of intractable focal epilepsy is still challenging 3. Previous studies showed that even for temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) with mesial tem- poral lobe sclerosis, the seizure freedom rate was 53–84% afer anteromesial temporal lobe resections. Similarly, the seizure freedom rate for patients with localized neocortical epilepsy was 36–76%4. Tese data suggest that the epileptogenic zone extends outsize the local brain lesions for some patients, and these epileptogenic zones could not be detected by conventional methodologies such as scalp or intracranial electroencephalography (EEG), structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), magnetoencephalography, and positron emission tomography. It is ofen assumed that the epileptogenic zone extends by way of the brain network; for example, mirror focus arises in the contralateral hemisphere in temporal lobe epilepsy in its clinical course 5. Te epileptogenic zone extends to the whole brain and the efect of brain surgery worsen over time6. Recently, resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) studies have been used to elucidate normal and various abnormal brain functional networks7–9 and many studies have shown that epilepsy patients have abnormal brain networks as measured by rs-fMRI10–13. However, the majority of studies performed group analyses that did not focus on individual epilepsy network alterations. If each individual brain network could be assessed before surgery, a better surgical outcome might be achieved. We consider that focal epilepsy has a common pathophysiological brain functional abnormality even if its epileptic focus is varied. Corresponding to this idea, some anti-epileptic drugs such as carbamazepine are efective for focal epilepsy but not for generalized epilepsy 14. Tus, we investigated whether brain network abnormalities could be assessed in individuals with various types 1Department of Neurological Surgery, Wakayama Medical University, 811-1 Kimiidera, Wakayama 641-8509, Japan. 2Department of System Neurophysiology, Wakayama Medical University, 811-1 Kimiidera, Wakayama 641-8509, Japan. 3Wakayama-Minami Radiology Clinic, 870-2 Kimiidera, Wakayama 641-0012, Japan. *email: [email protected] Scientifc Reports | (2021) 11:1545 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-81207-6 1 Vol.:(0123456789) www.nature.com/scientificreports/ of intractable focal epilepsies by comparing a large number of brain network data from healthy controls. Brain network structure could vary with various causes such as age15,16, sex17, and intelligence18,19, so a large amount of control data is necessary to determine the normal range and to assess each individual brain network structure. Centrality analysis using rs-fMRI has detected alterations in the network in several epilepsy types 10,20,21, and initial observations suggested a network disruption in epilepsy and disease progression as well as postsurgical seizure outcome, which emphasizes that graph theoretical analysis may lend markers for disease staging and prognostics. In this present study, we employed normalized α-centrality (nAC) on rs-fMRI22,23 to quantify the brain regional network organization to compare diferent centralities. Te nAC measures the strength of a node in a network from the local viewpoint to the global viewpoint by changing the parameter (that is, α) from zero to 1/λ; thereby, λ is the maximum eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of the network. We calculated nAC val- ues at each brain region with two diferent α values (0 and 1/λ) to determine the regional abnormality. Locally connected nodes were refected by nAC at α = 0 (nAC0), which corresponds to degree centrality. Conversely, globally connected nodes were refected by nAC at α = 1/λ (nAC1), which correspond to eigenvector centrality. nAC0 refects how many regions are connected to a given region, whereas a large nAC1 refects how strongly the connectivity of a given region contributes to the whole network. Te aim of this study was to elucidate abnormal brain regions using network properties that are specifc to each individual with intractable focal epilepsy by comparison with a relatively large number of control data. If it was possible, we assessed the relationship between these regional abnormalities and clinical parameters such as the QOL or seizure severity of patients. Results Patient characteristics. Twenty-fve patients with intractable (or drug-resistant) focal epilepsy (9 females and 16 males, age ranged from 16 to 70 years old, mean ± SD: 39.1 ± 12.3 years) participated in this study. Te duration of illness ranged from 1 to 42 years with a mean of 19.8 years; the number of antiepileptic drugs ranged from 1 to 4 with a mean of 2.8. Tree patients (cases 1, 12, and 13) underwent epilepsy surgery monitoring with electrocorticography (ECoG) afer the MRI study. Twelve patients (cases 1–12) had structural lesions (5 cortical malformations, 3 tumourous lesions, 2 hippocampal atrophy, 1 amygdala lesion, and 1 hippocampal lesion). Te demographic data for the patients including age at rs-fMRI, sex, epilepsy onset, duration of epilepsy, etiology, seizure type, EEG, and MRI fndings are summarized in Supplementary Table S1. We divided the patients into three groups based on the clinical data as follows: lobar type of temporal lobe (TLE type, n = 10), lobar type of extra-temporal lobe (focal type, n = 5), and multilobar type (n = 10)24. Network characteristics. Te number of nodes was 388 because the cerebral gray matters were divided into 368 regions using Atlas of Intrinsic Connectivity of Homotopic Areas (AICHA)25 and the cerebellar gray matters were divided into 20 regions using Automated Anatomical Labeling atlas (AAL)26 for 20 regions in the cerebellum (Supplementary Table S2). However, the number of edges varied with individuals as the func- tional connectivity strength measured by Pearson’s correlation coefcient between two regions was binarized at Z > 1.96 to make an adjacency matrix for each subject (see “Materials and methods”). Te mean number of edges was 6224 ± 1180 for the patients and 6845 ± 1201 for the controls. Te analysis of covariance revealed that the number of edges was signifcantly diferent between the controls and the epilepsy patients with age as a nui- sance covariate (df = 1, F = 7.19, p = 0.0075) and there was a signifcant interaction between group and age (df = 1, F = 6.97, p = 0.0085) (Supplementary Fig. S1). Te number of edges was not related to the clinical parameters of the patients, such as duration of illness (p > 0.05, Spearman’s partial correlation analysis excluding the efect of age), the number of anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs), the Quality of Life in the Epilepsy Inventory (QOLIE-31) and Liverpool Seizure Severity Scale (LSSS) (p > 0.05, Spearman’s correlation analysis). Distributions of nAC0 and nAC1. Te frequency distributions of the nAC values for each subject are cal- culated, and the representative data are shown in Fig. 1 (all the data are shown in Supplementary Figs. S2, S3). We found that the number of regions with lower nAC values (< 0.2) and higher nAC values (> 0.5) were larger than those for the controls for all the patients. Chi-square tests revealed that distributions of nAC0 and nAC1 for each patient were signifcantly diference from those for age- and sex-matched controls (p < 0.005). Spatial distributions of these values for the healthy controls (mean values for the 20, 40, and 60 years old) are shown in Supplementary Fig. S4. Defnition of mathematical measure. We defned abnormal regions (aR0 and aR1) whose nAC0 and nAC1, respectively, were greater than the mean + 2 SD of the age- and sex-matched values. Te relative frequency distribution of the aR0 and aR1 for both healthy controls and patients are shown in Supplementary Figure S5. As shown, the distributions were not normal. Chi-square tests revealed that distributions for the patients were sig- 2 2 nifcantly diferent from control data (χ = 147, p < 0.00001 for aR0; χ = 23.04, p = 0.00078 for aR1). Te median number of aR0 and aR1 for the patients were 19.5 and 18.0, respectively. Te number of aR0 was signifcantly higher than that for the controls (median = 10.5) (z = 3.5901, p = 0.00033, Wilcoxon rank sum test), whereas the number of aR1 was not signifcantly diferent from that for the controls (median = 14) (z = 0.7833, p > 0.05).