Altered cerebellar-cerebral resting-state functional connectivity reliably identifies major depressive disorder

In recent years, the cerebellum has been demonstrated to be involved in cognitive control and emotional processing and to play an important role in the pathology of major depressive disorder (MDD). The current study aims to explore the potential utility of selecting the altered cerebellar-cerebral functional connectivity as a classification feature to discriminate depressed patients from healthy controls. Twenty-four medication-free patients with major depression and 29 matched, healthy controls underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. A promising classification accuracy of 90.6% was achieved using resting-state functional connectivity between predefined cerebellar seed regions and the voxels within the cerebrum as features. Moreover, the most discriminating functional connections were mainly located between the cerebellum and the anterior cingulate cortex, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, the temporal lobe and the fusiform gyrus, which may contribute to the emotional and cognitive impairments observed in major depression. The current findings imply that the cerebellum might be considered as a node in the distributed disease-related brain network in major depression.