Widespread cortical dysfunction in schizophrenia: the FBIRN imaging consortium

This Special Theme issue presents a series of related papers describing fMRI data collected as part of a multi-site brain imaging consortium, the Functional Imaging Biomedical Informatics Research Network (FBIRN) on the same subject population ( approximately 125 patients and approximately 125 controls), a larger sample than would have been possible from a single-site, and from a broader clinical and demographic range of patients. Potkin et al observe cortical inefficiency during retrieval of items from memory but not during encoding of those items; Brown et al showed that the lawful relationship between memory retrieval time and neural activation is decoupled in patients with schizophrenia. Wible et al analyzed the same memory data and report activations of left auditory and parietal cortices are especially abnormal in patients who tend to hallucinate. Using an auditory target detection task, Ford et al report abnormal activation of left primary auditory cortex in the hallucinators. A multivariate analysis of those auditory data by Kim et al found differences in connectivity in patients and controls. These studies on the same patient sample suggest that abnormal circuitry characterizes schizophrenic performance in both auditory target detection and memory retrieval, and that patients who hallucinate have reduced left auditory cortical activation on both tasks. Segall et al report anatomical differences between patients and controls in the largest sample yet published. Finally, Potkin et al. identified six genes that influence DLPFC activation and have functions related to forebrain development and stress responses in schizophrenia. These related publications indicate the power of multisite neuroimaging.