Yousef H, Malagurski Törtei B. Atlas-based structural disconnectomes are associated to cognitive performance in brain tumors.
Brain Connect 2024. [PMID:
39302062 DOI:
10.1089/brain.2024.0028]
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Abstract
BACKGROUND
Brain tumors are associated with impaired cognitive functioning, which may result from disruptions in brain structural connectivity. Estimating structural disconnections is a more advantageous representation of tumor impact and can be performed indirectly through normative brain atlases.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Using a publicly available dataset of glioma and meningioma patient MRI scans and tumor masks, latent correlations were estimated between measures of structural disconnection and attention-based cognitive functioning. These measures included gray matter (GM) parcel damage, white matter tract (WMT) damage, GM parcel-to-parcel disconnections, and reaction time (RTI) as part of the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) to assess attention.
RESULTS
Preprocessing pipelines with two different methods of minimizing the pathology impact on MRI normalization were utilized: cost function masking and lesion filling. The results across both pipelines were nearly consistent, with significant correlations mainly found between RTI measures and the damage to left inferior fronto-occipital and uncinate fasciculus, as well as the left prefrontal-visual disconnections.
CONCLUSIONS
This alludes to the importance of left-hemispheric prefrontal-visual coupling in attention-based tasks, particularly those involving object- and feature-based attention.
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