Causality Mapping Using Resting-State fMRI reveals Suppressed Functional Connectivity in Schizophrenia Patients

Schizophrenia is a psychotic brain disorder in which patients exhibit aberrant connectivity between different regions of the brain. Neuroimaging is a state-of-the-art technique that is now increasingly been employed in clinical investigation of Schizophrenia. In the present study, we have used resting-state functional magnetic resonance neuroimaging (rsfMRI) to elucidate the cause-and-effect relationships among four regions of the brain including occipital, temporal, and frontal lobes and hippocampus in Schizophrenia. For that, we have employed independent component analysis, a seed-based temporal correlation analysis, and Granger causality analysis for measuring causal relationships amongst four regions of the brain in schizophrenia patients. Eighteen subjects with nine patients and nine controls were evaluated in the study. Our results show that Schizophrenia patients exhibit significantly different activation patterns across the selected regions of the brain in comparison with the control. In addition to that, we also observed an aberrant causal relationship between these four regions of the brain. In particular, the temporal and frontal lobes of patients with schizophrenia had a significantly lowered causal relationship with the other areas of the brain. Taken together, the study elucidates the dysregulated brain activity in Schizophrenia patients, decodes its causal mapping and provides novel insights towards employment in clinical evaluation of Schizophrenia.