Abstract
Objective To explore the property of cerebral small world network in refractory epilepsy patients by the method of graph theory. Methods Twenty patients with refractory epilepsy and 20 healthy controls with age, sex and education level matched in the Affiliated Anhui Provincial Hospital, Anhui Medical University, were recruited from November 2013 to September 2014, gathering the two groups' resting state functional MRI data, applying the SPM8 software package for data preprocessing and obtaining the cerebral network functional connection matrix through the cerebral network construction, then getting the word network property through the calculation of the threshold limit, by the two-sample t test to compare the alteration of the refractory epilepsy patients in the related cerebral regions parameters with the healthy control group. Results Regarding the connection of the matrix sparsity as the threshold, in the range of 0.05 to 0.40, the refractory epilepsy patients and the healthy controls both were in line with the property. The γ values of the two groups had a statistically significant difference (1.834±0.323 vs 2.182±0.199, t=-2.795, P<0.05), while the λ value overall did not. Statistical analysis of the 90 cerebral regions of the λ showed that the λ values in the bilateral thalamus(left 3.093±3.224, right 3.084±3.233), bilateral globus pallidus(left 1.120±0.777, right 1.234±0.880) and bilateral hippocampus (left 0.930±0.269, right 1.041±0.357)of the refractory epilepsy patients were significantly higher than those of the healthy controls (0.970±0.500, t=2.413; 0.965±4.891, t=2.405; 0.679±0.075, t=2.253; 0.662±0.073, t=2.333; 0.695±0.101, t=2.808; 0.615±0.036, t=4.251; all P<0.05). Conclusions The refractory epilepsy patients still have the network property, but the local information processing efficiency and part of the brain regions' function have been damaged. Key words: Epilepsy; Cerebral cortex; Connectome; Nerve net
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