Abnormal spontaneous brain activity of white matter in patients with cerebral small vessel disease

Cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD) is a nervous system disease caused by small vessel lesions in the brain. The abnormal changes in white matter (WM) function in patients with CSVD remained unclear. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to study the abnormal function of WM in patients with CSVD by measuring the amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (ALFF). Twenty-three patients with CSVD and 22 healthy controls (HCs), age- and sex-matched, were included. Based on the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data, the ALFF method was used to investigate alterations in spontaneous brain activity in WM between the two groups. The altered ALFF values were extracted to serve as classification features, and the linear support vector machine (SVM) was adopted to identify patients with CSVD. patients with CSVD displayed decreased ALFF values in the body of corpus callosum (BCC) and genu of corpus callosum (GCC) and increased ALFF values in the splenium of corpus callosum (SCC), right posterior corona radiata (PCR.R) and left cingulate gyrus (CGG.L) than HCs. The SVM model achieved an accuracy of 82.22 % and the area under the curve (AUC) was 0.88. This study revealed altered ALFF values of WM in patients with CSVD, which provides evidence for cognitive and gait disorders, as well as brain compensatory mechanisms in patients with CSVD. Our findings suggest that spontaneous brain activity abnormalities in WM may be connected with the pathophysiological mechanism of CSVD, providing potential imaging biomarkers for CSVD diagnosis.