| Title: | Predicting Regional Cerebral Blood Flow Using Voxel-Wise Resting-State Functional MRI |
| Journal: | Brain Sciences |
| Published: | 23 Aug 2025 |
| Pubmed: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41008269/ |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci15090908 |
| URL: | https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/15/9/908/pdf?version=1755946226 |
Publication 19680
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Abstract
Background: Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) is a putative biomarker for neuropsychiatric disorders, including major depressive disorder (MDD). Methods: Here, we show that rCBF can be predicted from resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI) at the voxel level while correcting for partial volume averaging (PVA) artifacts. Cortical patterns of MDD-related CBF differences decoded from rsfMRI using a PVA-corrected approach showed excellent agreement with CBF measured using single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and arterial spin labeling (ASL). A support vector machine algorithm was trained to decode cortical voxel-wise CBF from temporal and power-spectral features of voxel-level rsfMRI time series while accounting for PVA. Three datasets, Amish Connectome Project (N = 300; 179 M/121 F, both rsfMRI and ASL data), UK Biobank (N = 8396; 3097 M/5319 F, rsfMRI data), and Amen Clinics Inc. datasets (N = 372: N = 183 M/189 F, SPECT data), were used. Results: PVA-corrected CBF values predicted from rsfMRI showed significant correlation with the whole-brain (r = 0.54, p = 2 × 10-5) and 31 out of 34 regional (r = 0.33 to 0.59, p < 1.1 × 10-3) rCBF measures from 3D ASL. PVA-corrected rCBF values showed significant regional deficits in the UKBB MDD group (Cohen's d = -0.30 to -0.56, p < 10-28), with the strongest effect sizes observed in the frontal and cingulate areas. The regional deficit pattern of MDD-related hypoperfusion showed excellent agreement with CBF deficits observed in the SPECT data (r = 0.74, p = 4.9 × 10-7). Consistent with previous findings, this new method suggests that perfusion signals can be predicted using voxel-wise rsfMRI signals. Conclusions: CBF values computed from widely available rsfMRI can be used to study the impact of neuropsychiatric disorders such as MDD on cerebral neurophysiology.</p>
18 Authors
- Hongjie Ke
- Bhim M. Adhikari
- Yezhi Pan
- David B. Keator
- Daniel Amen
- Si Gao
- Yizhou Ma
- Paul M. Thompson
- Neda Jahanshad
- Jessica A. Turner
- Theo G. M. van Erp
- Mohammed R. Milad
- Jair C. Soares
- Vince D. Calhoun
- Juergen Dukart
- L. Elliot Hong
- Tianzhou Ma
- Peter Kochunov
Enabling scientific discoveries that improve human health