Differences in the Relationship Between Structural Connectivity and Functional Activation Following Pediatric TBI
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Date
2024-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can cause shearing of white matter (WM) pathways and put children at risk of WM degradation. TBI has also been linked with spatial working memory (SWM) deficits, a crucial aspect of executive function that mainly activates the fronto-parietal network (FPN). WM connections within these cortical areas may be integral to support this ability. This project examines the associations among structural connectivity and functional activation in the FPN during a SWM task along major pathways in children with moderate-to-severe TBI (msTBI), complicated-mild TBI (cmTBI), and orthopedic injury (OI) as a control. Forty-one children with msTBI (n=9, Mage=12.04), cmTBI (n=10, Mage=12.93), and OI (n=22, Mage=11.53) underwent MRI in a 3T Siemens scanner, where a T1-weighted structural, 64-direction DTI, and task-based fMRI scans were collected. The SWM task consisted of four characters that lived in a linear space. Children were presented with characters and an event at a certain location, then ranked how quickly one character would arrive. We utilized Freesurfer’s (v7.3.2) TRACULA to perform automated probabilistic tractography on the corpus callosum (CC), cingulum bundles (CB), bilateral anterior thalamic radiations (ATRs), bilateral longitudinal (i.e., ILF, MLF, and SLF I-III), and bilateral uncinate fasciculi (UF). An FPN region of interest was generated based on a meta-analysis map from Neurosynth, corrected using an FDR of 0.01, and binarized. We extracted individual averages of brain activation for three and four characters contrasted to one character. We fitted a general linear model to WM measures along the tracts of interest and added brain activation as a covariate. We found no significant differences in task accuracy (ps>.05) but could confirm WM differences among and between groups (ps<.05). The groups differed in WM microstructure in the rostrum of the CC, and these were related to brain activation in the FPN (ps<.05). Our findings highlight a possible deficit in SWM due to WM disruption after TBI.
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Keywords
Traumatic brain injury, White matter, Functional activation, Spatial working memory