A Study of Resting State FMRI Dynamic Functional Network Analysis of MTBI
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Abstract
Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI) is one of the most common
neurological disorders. A subset of patients develop persistent
cognitive deficits. A number of the brain studies have been conducted
to discover the abnormalities and disruptions in the brain functional
networks using similar methods to those employed in more severe brain
disorders such as Alzheimer's or Schizophrenia. Static functional
network analysis using resting state brain fMRI images has shown some
promising results in identifying characteristics of MTBI. However,
recent development in the dynamics of functional networks have been
able to reveal insightful information about anomalies in brain
activities that have not been observed when using traditional static
analysis. Our work focuses on both static and dynamic functional
analysis of the brain. Our overall analysis pipeline is data-driven
using a dataset of 47 MTBI subjects and a demographically matching
healthy control group size of 30. The data-driven approach
proactively removes noise, focuses on the entire brain functional
networks and performs advanced independent component analysis,
followed by statistical tests to characterize the functional networks
of MTBI patients. A key distinction of our research is the finer
labeling of MTBI subject according to their long term 6 months
recovery status. Our results suggest that those MTBI subject who
suffer prolonged recovery exhibit disturbed functional networks, and
slowed dynamism in functional connectivity than those of the healthy
control or those MTBI participants who recovered quickly. A number of
useful network measurements have been found to capture the states and
changes of the brain functional networks for healthy and different
types of MTBI subjects in their resting state. We believe that our
findings can shed more light into the impact of MTBI on the
effectiveness of several functional networks and can contribute to
helping clinicians make more informed decisions to aid in the recovery
of MTBI patients.