Aberrant interhemispheric structural and functional connectivity within whole brain in schizophrenia

Objective: Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder whose etiology remains unclear. Although numerous studies have analyzed the abnormal gray matter functional activity and whole-brain anatomical changes in schizophrenia, fMRI signal fluctuations from white matter have usually been ignored and rarely reported in the literature. Methods: We employed 45 schizophrenia subjects and 75 healthy controls (HCs) from a publicly available fMRI dataset. By combining the voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) measure and fiber tracking method, we investigated the interhemispheric functional and structural connectivity within whole brain in schizophrenia. Results: Compared to HCs, patients with schizophrenia exhibited significantly reduced VMHC in the bilateral middle occipital gyrus, precentral gyrus, postcentral gyrus and corpus callosum. Fiber tracking results showed the changes in structural connectivity for the bilateral precentral gyrus, and the bilateral corpus callosum, and the fiber bundles connecting bilateral precentral gyrus and connecting the bilateral corpus callosum passed through the posterior midbody, isthmus and splenium of mid-sagittal corpus callosum, which closely related to the interhemispheric integration of visual and auditory information. More importantly, we observed a negative correlation between averaged VMHC values in the postcentral gyrus and SAPS scores, and a positive correlation between the fractional anisotropy of fiber bundle connecting the bilateral precentral gyrus and Matrix Reasoning scores in schizophrenia. Conclusion: Our findings provide a novel perspective of white matter functional images on understanding abnormal interhemispheric visual and auditory information transfer in schizophrenia.