Subcortico-Cortical Interactions Of Edge Functional Connectivity In Parkinson’s Disease

Functional changes in both subcortical and cortical brain regions influence the clinical phenotype of parkinson’s disease. Although these changes has been studied on node-centrical network analysis, the precise mechanism of the brain subcortico-cortical functional interactions resulting in the described clinical symptoms is unknown in parkinson’s disease. Here, we quantified regional functional interactions for each participant (patients, n=73, matched healthy controls, n = 76) by adopting an edge-centric network approach. After clustering the edges into communities by k-means clustering, we calculated community entropy within and between networks. Compared with healthy controls, we found that the entropy decreased across the subcortex but peaked in striatum (putamen) and cortex peaked in dorsal attention network (anterior cingulate cortex) in parkinson’s disease. Across spatial scales, the regional functional interactions between putamen and primary, heteromodal systems was decreased, which is systematically associated with the Hoehn and Yahr scales. Together, our findings reveal that the putamen may play a pivotal role in modulating subcortico-cortical interactions at the functional level, which expand the previous investigations on the pathologic mechanisms of parkinson’s disease.