Aberrant global and local dynamic properties in schizophrenia with instantaneous phase method based on Hilbert...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Medical Imaging

Background:

• Schizophrenia is increasingly understood through aberrant spatiotemporal interactions.
• Functional imaging suggests dynamic property alterations in schizophrenia.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate dynamic functional connectivity (FC) in schizophrenia using the instantaneous phase method.
• Detect abnormal spatiotemporal interactions in schizophrenia patients (SZ) compared to healthy controls (HCs).

Main Methods:

• Utilized resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from two independent datasets (COBRE and OpenfMRI).
• Calculated phase differences and instantaneous coupling matrices to assess global synchrony, intertemporal closeness (ITC), FC strength (sFC), and FC variability (vFC).
• Employed Support Vector Machine (SVM) to classify SZ and HCs based on aberrant dynamic features.

Main Results:

• Schizophrenia patients showed significantly lower global synchrony and ITC than controls across both datasets.
• SZ exhibited decreased sFC and increased vFC, primarily in prefrontal, anterior cingulate, temporal, and visual cortices, and hippocampus.
• SVM analysis achieved 85.75% balanced accuracy in discriminating between SZ and HCs using these dynamic features.

Conclusions:

• Schizophrenia is characterized by impaired spatiotemporal stability and extensive functional connectivity subnetwork lesions.
• These findings offer insights into the pathophysiology of schizophrenia and the time-varying properties of mental illnesses.