Resting-state FMRI Based Analysis On Functional Brain Activity In Patients With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis（ALS）is a disorder caused by damage to the upper and lower motor neurons.At present,the pathophysiological mechanism of ALS is still unclear,and there is no effective way to treat ALS.Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging（rs-fMRI）has played an important role in the study of ALS,and although functional connectivity at resting-state fMRI has been extensively studied,the spontaneous neural activity of the brain in resting-state Research in ALS is still relatively small.In this study,I mainly use resting-state fMRI to analyze the brain function activity of ALS patients.Using the resting-state fMRI data of 30 ALS patients and 30 healthy subjects,by calculating the regional homogeneity（Re Ho）,calculating the Amplitude of Low-Frequency Fluctuations（ALFF）in different frequency bands and fractional Amplitude of Low-Frequency Fluctuations（f ALFF）and Degree Centrality（DC）analysis methods to study differences in brain functional activity between ALS patients and healthy controls.Although the neurophysiological basis for calculating Re Ho and measuring ALFF and f ALFF has not been established,these metrics have the advantage of high reproducibility in resting-state fMRI studies.It is possible that ALFF and f ALFF are related to the integration between many oscillatory systems,so as a supplement,Re Ho can be used to explain the functional consistency of brain regions,and combined with DC to analyze the connectivity of various functional brain regions can obtain more information.Physiological and pathological information of ALS.In the comparison of the study results,the first is that ALS patients compared with healthy controls in three groups of different sizes of adjacent voxels in the local consistency analysis（GRF adjusted,p<0.05）showed: Re Ho values were higher in the bilateral paracentral lobules,bilateral supplementary motor areas,left superior occipital gyrus,and lower in the left lingual gyrus and cerebellum.Other distinct brain regions behave differently in the Re Ho values calculated from three sets of adjacent voxels of different sizes.Taking these different brain regions as regions of interest,the correlation between the Re Ho value of the above regions and the clinical scale ALSFRS-R score showed that the right supplementary motor area was significantly positively correlated with the clinical scale score;then In the low-frequency amplitude oscillation research method,the performance of ALFF and f ALFF in different frequency bands are different,but the changes are mainly in the visual processing area and the motor function area.Finally,the results of degree centrality analysis showed that compared with healthy subjects,ALS patients had significantly higher DC values in the right paracentral lobule,left fusiform gyrus,and left middle occipital gyrus.In the cerebellum,the right side supplemented exercise The DC values of the lingual gyrus were significantly reduced.All in all,the changes of these indicators help us to understand the pathophysiological mechanism of ALS disease from the perspective of resting-state fMRI technology.