Reorganization of functional brain networks during the recovery of stroke: A functional MRI study

Abstract

Studies have demonstrated that reorganization of the cortex after stroke contributed to the recovery of motor function. However, these studies paid much more attention to the reorganization of motor-related brain regions and motor executive network which only contained tens of brain regions, ignoring the change in brain-wide network during the restoration of motor function. Based on this consideration, this paper investigated the functional reorganization of brain-wide network during the recovery after stroke from the perspective of graph theory. At four time points (less than 10 days, around 2 weeks, 1 month and 3 months) after stroke onset, we obtained the functional MRI (fMRI) data of stroke patients when they were doing finger tapping task. Based on the fMRI data, we constructed the brain-wide functional network which consisted of 264 putative functional areas for each subject at each time point. Then the topological parameters (e.g., characteristic path length and cluster coefficient) of these brain networks were examined. Results showed that the brain networks shifted towards a non-optimal topological configuration with low small-worldness during the process of recovery. And this finding may broaden our knowledge about the reorganization of brain function during recovery after stroke.