[fMRI functional connectivity analysis of anxiety disease patients based on spatiotemporal Lyapunov exponent method]

Attempting to use nonlinear spatiotemporal Lyapunov exponent to characterize fMRI brain functional connectivity of anxiety disease patients, we adopted the methods of nonlinear spatiotemporal Lyapunov exponent and linear correlation coefficients to analyses fMRI datum of 11 anxiety disease patients and 11 healthy volunteers, respectively. The results show that there are significant normalized variance exponent (NVE) differences in Inferior Frontal Gyrus (rIFG) and Medial Frontal Gyrus (MFG) between the two groups (P<0.01). And correlation coefficients shows significant differences (P<0.05). The spatial-temporal Lyapunov exponent method had higher sensitivity than the correlation coefficient method in the characterization of functional connectivity; Anxiety disease patients have abnormal functional connectivity in rIFG and MFG during our experiment.