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Journal of Neurology and Neurorehabilitation Research | Volume 3
August 23-24, 2018 | Paris, France
Neurology and Neurological Disorders
18th International Conference on
Parietal-thalamic dysconnectivity during sustainedattentionprocessing in young adultswithTraumatic
Brain Injury
Xiaobo Li and Ziyan Wu
New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major public health problem
with potentially serious long-term neurobehavioral
sequelae. Attention deficits occur in approximately 15-20% of
TBI survivors and are the most common persistent cognitive
impairments post TBI. The consensus regarding appropriate
evaluation of attention deficits in adults with TBI is rather
limited due to lack of understanding of the neurobiological
substrate associated with this syndrome.
In this study, functional magnetic resonance imaging data
during a visual sustained attention task were obtained from
14 young adults who had history of one or multiple diffuse
axonal TBIs which were clinically confirmed at least 6 months
prior the study and 15 demographically matched normal
controls. Task responsive brain activation map was constructed
for each participant using FEAT/FSL
fsl). Between-group comparisons of whole brain voxel-based
functional activations were conducted using unpaired two-
sample t-test. Relative to controls, subjects with TBI showed
decreased activations in frontal and parietal cortices and
increased activations in bilateral thalami (Figure 1A). Based
on these results, four regions of interest (ROIs) from the right
middle frontal cortex, left inferior parietal cortex and bilateral
thalami were located. The average time series inside each ROI
was calculated. Functional connectivity between each pair of
the ROIs was examined by calculating the Pearson’s correlation
coefficient of the average time series of the two ROIs. Between-
group comparisons of the functional connectivity measures
were carried out using unpaired two-sample t-test. Multiple
comparisons were corrected using the FDR at α = 0.05. Relative
to controls, subjects with TBI showed significantly decreased
functional connectivity between the left inferior parietal cortex
and right thalamus.
Parietal cortex and thalamus are key components in attention
and cognitive processing pathways. The results of decreased
functional activations in parietal region, increased functional
activations in thalamic area and reduced interactions between
these two areas during visual attention processing in patients
with TBI, thus suggest that functional alterations in parietal
cortex and thalamus may significantly contribute to TBI induced
attention deficits. Further study can focus on investigating
associations between brain imaging and attention-related
behavioral measures in TBI patients in a larger study sample.
Speaker Biography
Xiaobo Li is an Associate Professor and Director of the Computational Neuroanatomy
and Neuroinformatics lab (CNN lab) in the Department of Biomedical Engineering
at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). Dr. Li received her Ph.D. in 2004 from
the University of Birmingham, UK, on geometrical modeling in digitized data. She
has extensive research experience in developing and translating mathematical
techniques to quantitatively evaluate the structural and functional organization
in the human brain using structural MRI/fMRI/DTI data, and extensive clinical
application experience in brain development and disorders such as Attention Deficit/
Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), schizophrenia, etc.
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