Soon after the advent of signal-recording techniques in the brain, functional connectivity (FC), a measure of interregional neural interactions, became an important tool to assess brain function and its relation to structure. It was discovered that certain groups of regions in the brain corresponding to behavioural domains are organized into intrinsic networks of connectivity (ICNs). These networks were shown to exhibit high FC during rest, and also during task. ICNs are not only delineated by areas which correspond to various behaviours, but can be modulated in the long and short-term in their connectivity by disease conditions, learning, and task performance. The significance of changes in FC, permanent and transient, is poorly understood with respect to even the simplest ICNs corresponding to motor and visual regions. A better grasp on how to interpret these changes could elucidate the mechanisms and implications of patterns in FC changes during therapy and basic tasks. The aim of this work is to examine long-term changes in the connectivity of several ICNs as a result of modulation by stroke and rehabilitation, and to assess short term changes due to simple, continuous task performance in healthy volunteers. To explore long-term changes in ICN connectivity, fifteen hemiparetic stroke patients underwent resting state scanning and behavioural testing before and after a two-week session of Constraint Induced Movement Therapy (CIMT). It was found that therapy led to localized increases in FC within the sensorimotor ICN. To assess transient changes in FC with task, sixteen healthy volunteers underwent a series of scans during rest, continuous performance of a non-demanding finger-tapping task, viewing of a continuous visual stimulus, and a combined (but uncoupled) visual and motor task. Group Independent Component Analysis (ICA) revealed that canonical ICNs remained robustly connected during task conditions as well as during rest, and dual regression/seed analyses showed that visual and sensorimotor ICNs showed divergent patterns of changes in FC, with the former showing increased intra-network connectivity and the latter decreased intra-network connectivity. Additionally, it was found that task activation within ICNs has a relationship to these changes in FC. Overall, these results suggest that modulation of functional connectivity is a valuable and informative tool in the study of disease recovery and task performance.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:618398 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Madugula, Sasidhar |
| Contributors | Johansen-Berg, Heidi; Makin, Tamar; Duff, Eugene |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d7cde8d6-42b9-4b1e-b70f-0109b0108fe2 |
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