Functional And Structural MRI Research In Migraine Patients

In recent years, brain imaging technology, especially the emergence and rapid development of magnetic resonance imaging(Magnetic Resonance Imaging, MRI) provide a variety of brain imaging tools for data acquisition. Technologies in resting state MRI and diffusion tensor imaging have served powerful tools for the study of brain connectivity. In the current paper, the amplitude of low frequency fluctuation(Amplitude of Low-Frequency Fluctuation, ALFF) at different frequency bands, fiber tractgraphy based on diffusion tensor imaging(Diffusion Tensor Imaging, DTI) technology were used to study functional and structural abnormalities in patients with migraine, providing evidence of differences in function and structure for the patient of migraine, and further applied to clinical brain disease, detecting the intrinsic pathophysiology of brain disease from the system level. The main research work includes the following two parts:1. Multi-band ALFF was used to study the resting state of migraine patients in the whole brain. The results showed that migraine patients:(1)In the slow-5 frequency band, no significant brain areas were found;(2) In the slow-4 frequency band, decreased ALFF value were observed in the left inferior frontal gyrus in migraine patients;(3) in the slow-3 frequency band, migraine patients showed increased ALFF value in right part of calcarine, cuneus, and middle occipital cortex, and decreased value in right middle frontal gyrus;(4) in the slow-2 band, ALFF value was found to be increase in the right inferior temporal gyrus, and decrease in the right middle cingulate and right supplementary motor area in migraine patients. No correlations were observed in migraine patients between difference in ALFF and VAS and MoCA scores, as well as with attack frequency and disease duration. It is the first study of ALFF abnormalities at slow-2 and slow-3 bands in migraine patients, we hypothesized that the abnormalities in these regions might be associated with dysfunction of pain processing in migraine. Our results provide local functional characteristics of a specific area in the resting state, may also provide potential clinical biomarkers and treatment strategies for patients with migraine.2. Firstly, ICA was employed to get the default modal network(DMN). DTI-based fiber tractgraphy was then used to connect brain areas within DMN. We applied statistics only in such connections with at least 75% fiber connections existed across each group. We found that there are only three connections, namely, the left angular gyrus--posterior cingulate cortex(AG_L--PCC), right angular gyrus--posterior cingulate cortex(AG_R--PCC), and medial prefrontal cortex--posterior cingulate cortex(MPFC--PCC). Differences in FA values were found in these three connections, but only one connection in AG_R--PCC showed significant increase of FA value. No correlation was found in patient between FA and VAS and MoCA scores, so as disease duration and attack frequency. We speculate that the duration of the disease is relatively short. The patient’s pain intensity is not strong enough so that we can not find any association with the default mode network. But it will still provide new insights into the pathogenesis of migraine and early diagnosis of migraine patients.