Spatiotemporal consistency analysis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder children

Abstract

Purpose: To identify the local spatiotemporal consistency of spontaneous brain activity of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) adolescents and its relation with clinical performance.

Materials and methods: A cohort of 50 adolescents with ADHD-I or ADHD-C and a cohort of age- and gender- matched 46 typical development controls (TDC) were recruited from ADHD-200 dataset. FOur-dimensional (spatiotemporal) Consistency of local neural Activities (FOCA) metric was used to analyze the local spatiotemporal consistency, which integrating local temporal homogeneity and regional stability of brain activity states. The difference of normalized FOCA (nFOCA) values among ADHD-Inattentive (ADHD-I), ADHD-Combined (ADHD-C) and TDC were detected using ANOVA and post-hoc analysis. Furthermore, partial correlations were analyzed to investigate the relationship between nFOCA values and clinical manifestations.

Results: Compared with TDC, ADHD-C and ADHD-I adolescents demonstrated alterations of FOCA in bilateral middle temporal gyrus, superior occipital gyrus, postcentral gyrus, precuneus, and right inferior temporal gyrus, lingual gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, left middle cingulum gyrus, middle occipital gyrus and cerebellum area.

Conclusions: Our study suggests that the FOCA method perhaps has potential to provide important insights into understanding the pathophysiological mechanism of ADHD and its subtypes.

Keywords: ADHD; ADHD-200; FOCA; rs-fMRI.