1. Identifiable Patterns of Trait, State, and Experience in Chronic Stroke Recovery
- Author
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Duncan, E Susan, Shereen, A Duke, Gentimis, Thanos, and Small, Steven L
- Subjects
Biomedical and Clinical Sciences ,Neurosciences ,Stroke ,Brain Disorders ,Clinical Research ,Adult ,Aged ,Aphasia ,Chronic Disease ,Connectome ,Female ,Humans ,Individuality ,Ischemic Stroke ,Language Therapy ,Magnetic Resonance Imaging ,Male ,Middle Aged ,Outcome Assessment ,Health Care ,Stroke Rehabilitation ,Support Vector Machine ,aphasia ,functional neuroimaging ,magnetic resonance imaging ,rehabilitation ,stroke ,supervised machine learning ,Clinical Sciences ,Cognitive Sciences ,Rehabilitation - Abstract
BackgroundConsiderable evidence indicates that the functional connectome of the healthy human brain is highly stable, analogous to a fingerprint.ObjectiveWe investigated the stability of functional connectivity across tasks and sessions in a cohort of individuals with chronic stroke using a supervised machine learning approach.MethodsTwelve individuals with chronic stroke underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) seven times over 18 weeks. The middle 6 weeks consisted of intensive aphasia therapy. We collected fMRI data during rest and performance of 2 tasks. We calculated functional connectivity metrics for each imaging run, then applied a support vector machine to classify data on the basis of participant, task, and time point (pre- or posttherapy). Permutation testing established statistical significance.ResultsWhole brain functional connectivity matrices could be classified at levels significantly greater than chance on the basis of participant (87.1% accuracy; P < .0001), task (68.1% accuracy; P = .002), and time point (72.1% accuracy; P = .015). All significant effects were reproduced using only the contralesional right hemisphere; the left hemisphere revealed significant effects for participant and task, but not time point. Resting state data could also be used to classify task-based data according to subject (66.0%; P < .0001). While the strongest posttherapy changes occurred among regions outside putative language networks, connections with traditional language-associated regions were significantly more positively correlated with behavioral outcome measures, and other regions had more negative correlations and intrahemispheric connections.ConclusionsFindings suggest the profound importance of considering interindividual variability when interpreting mechanisms of recovery in studies of functional connectivity in stroke.
- Published
- 2021