Alteration of power law scaling of spontaneous brain activity in schizophrenia

Nonlinear dynamical analysis has been used to quantify the complexity of brain signal at temporal scales. Power law scaling is a well-validated method in physics that has been used to describe the dynamics of a system in the frequency domain, ranging from noisy oscillation to complex fluctuations. In this research, we investigated the power-law characteristics in a large-scale resting-state fMRI data of schizophrenia and healthy participants derived from Taiwan Aging and Mental Illness cohort. We extracted the power spectral density (PSD) of resting signal by Fourier transform. Power law scaling of PSD was estimated by determining the slope of the regression line fitting to the logarithm of PSD. t-Test was used to assess the statistical difference in power law scaling between schizophrenia and healthy participants. The significant differences in power law scaling were found in six brain regions. Schizophrenia patients have significantly more positive power law scaling (i.e., more homogenous frequency components) at four brain regions: left precuneus, left medial dorsal nucleus, right inferior frontal gyrus, and right middle temporal gyrus and less positive power law scaling (i.e., more dominant at lower frequency range) in bilateral putamen compared with healthy participants. Moreover, significant correlations of power law scaling with the severity of psychosis were found. These findings suggest that schizophrenia has abnormal brain signal complexity linked to psychotic symptoms. The power law scaling represents the dynamical properties of resting-state fMRI signal may serve as a novel functional brain imaging marker for evaluating patients with mental illness.