Abnormal dynamic properties of functional connectivity in disorders of consciousness

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is widely used to research abnormal functional connectivity (FC) in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC). However, most studies assumed steady spatial-temporal signal interactions between distinct brain regions during the scan period. The aim of this study was to explore abnormal dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) in DOC patients. After excluding 26 patients’ data that failed to meet the requirements of imaging quality, we retained 19 DOC patients (12 with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome and 7 in a minimally conscious state, diagnosed with the Coma Recovery Scale-Revised [CRS-R]) for the dFC analysis. We used the sliding windows approach to construct dFC matrices. Then these matrices were clustered into distinct states using the k-means clustering algorithm. We found that the DOC patients showed decreased dFC in the sensory and somatomotor networks compared with the healthy controls. There were also significant differences in temporal properties, the mean dwell time (MDT) and the number of transitions (NT), between the DOC patients and the healthy controls. In addition, we also used a hidden Markov model (HMM) to test the robustness of the results. With the connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM) approach, we found that the properties of abnormal dynamic network can be used to predict the CRS-R scores of the patients after severe brain injury. These findings may contribute to a better understanding of the abnormal brain networks in DOC patients.