Elsevier

Neuroscience Letters

Volume 476, Issue 1, 26 May 2010, Pages 46-51
Neuroscience Letters

Regional homogeneity of fMRI time series in autism spectrum disorders

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2010.03.080Get rights and content

Abstract

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI) studies of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have suggested atypical patterns of activation and long-distance connectivity for diverse tasks and networks in ASD. We explored the regional homogeneity (ReHo) approach in ASD, which is analogous to conventional fcMRI, but focuses on local connectivity. FMRI data of 26 children with ASD and 29 typically developing (TD) children were acquired during continuous task performance (visual search). Effects of motion and task were removed and Kendall's coefficient of concordance (KCC) was computed, based on the correlation of the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) time series for each voxel and its six nearest neighbors. ReHo was lower in the ASD than the TD group in superior parietal and anterior prefrontal regions. Inverse effects of greater ReHo in the ASD group were detected in lateral and medial temporal regions, predominantly in the right hemisphere. Our findings suggest that ReHo is a sensitive measure for detecting cortical abnormalities in autism. However, impact of methodological factors (such as spatial resolution) on ReHo require further investigation.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, R01-DC006155, R01-MH081023, and 1T32 DC007361-03 (BK). Thanks to the children and families who participated, to Yufeng Zang, Chao-Gan Yan, and Xiang-Yu Long for technical support, and to Patricia Shih for comments on the manuscript.

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