Objectives: Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder which resists around 10 million people worldwide. It develops when nerve cells in a region of the brain that regulates movement become damaged; the symptoms usually begin gradually and become critical over time. In this study, we proposed to investigate the topological properties of functional brain networks within healthy controls (HCs) and PD patients. Also, we evaluated the gender difference among PD patients through graph theoretical approach.
Materials and methods: The rs-fMRI (resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging) data of fifty-one PD patients and healthy controls was applied to generate the brain functional connectome. The functional whole-brain connectome was constructed by thresholding partial correlation matrices of 160 regions from Dosenbach brain atlas. From the graph theory approach, global and nodal metrics were analysed, and we observed considerable changes in PD patients in comparison with healthy controls.
Results: Findings suggest that there is a significant difference in the topological characteristics of PD patients, and this was found to be evident in the default mode network (DMN) and occipital regions.
Conclusion: This study provides essential insights from network changes to the clinically relevant information for the PD progression.
Keywords: Parkinson’s disease; brain network; functional connectome; graph theory; network topology; resting-state functional MRI.