Altered Regional Homogeneity in Patients With Corneal Ulcer: A Resting-State Functional MRI Study.

Gang Tan,Hui-Min Liu,Biao Li,Qi Lin,Man-Wei Xu,Yi Shao,Xiao-Wei Xu,Ting Su,Wen-Feng Liu,Wei Wu,Chu-Qi Xiang,Gui-Ping Gao,You-Lan Min

doi:10.3389/fnins.2019.00743

Abstract

ObjectiveTo investigate the potential regional homogeneity (ReHo) brain activity changes in patients with corneal ulcer (CU) and their possible relationship with clinical symptoms.Materials and MethodsForty patients with CU (26 men and 14 women), and 40 healthy controls (HCs) (26 men and 14 women) closely matched in age, sex, and weight underwent resting-state functional MRI scans, respectively. The ReHo method was applied to evaluate synchronous neural activity changes. Receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC curve) was used to show high test-retest stability and high degree of sensitivity and specificity. We utilized the correlation analysis to calculate the relationship between the average ReHo signal values in different brain areas and the clinical symptoms in CU patients.ResultsCompared with the HCs, CU patients had significantly increased ReHo values in right cerebellum posterior lobe, left cerebellum posterior lobe, left inferior temporal gyrus, right lingual gyrus, left middle frontal gyrus, left angular gyrus, left cingulate gyrus, right angular gyrus and bilateral superior frontal gyrus, and decreased ReHo values in right anterior cingulate and left precentral gyrus. ROC curve analysis of each brain regions showed the accuracy of AUC was perfect except the right cerebellum posterior lobe. Nevertheless, there was no clear evidence of prominent relevance between the average ReHo values in brain areas and the clinical symptoms.ConclusionCorneal ulcer caused dysfunctional adaption in different brain areas, which including relatively increased values and decreased values. This finding may help us take a further step in exploring the underlying pathologic mechanisms of CU.

Highlights

Corneal ulcer (CU), a common ophthalmological disease, is a kind of inflammatory reaction of cornea
The tentative diagnosis of CU can often be made by slit lamp, fluorescein staining and in vivo confocal microscopy (IVCM) (Herz et al, 2008)
As far as we know, this is the first study that the regional homogeneity (ReHo) method has been used to estimate the effect of CU on resting-state brain activity till

Summary

Introduction

Corneal ulcer (CU), a common ophthalmological disease, is a kind of inflammatory reaction of cornea. CU can be divided into infectious CU and non-infectious CU and in China, ReHo Study in Individuals With Corneal Ulcer the infectious factors of virus, fungus, bacteria, and acanthamoeba, plays the leading role in resulting in CU (Song et al, 2011). CU can result in severe complications including corneal perforation, endophthalmitis, and iris atrophy (Herz et al, 2008; Rana et al, 2015; Zapp et al, 2018). A previous research already showed that corneal disease had influence on brain area activities (Arrigo et al, 2018). The inspection methods mentioned above only focused on the effects of the ocular surface on brain activities and ignored the rest of the visual system containing the eye and the connecting pathways through the visual cortex and other regions of brain

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