Table tennis involves quick and accurate motor responses during training and competition. Multiple studies have reported considerably faster visuomotor responses and expertise-related intrinsic brain activity changes among table tennis players compared with matched controls. However, the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. Herein, we performed static and dynamic resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) analyses of 20 table tennis players and 21 control subjects using 7T ultra-high field imaging. We calculated the static and dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (ALFF) of the two groups. The results revealed that table tennis players exhibited decreased static ALFF in the left inferior temporal gyrus (lITG) compared with the control group. Voxel-wised static functional connectivity (sFC) and dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) analyses using lITG as the seed region afforded complementary and overlapping results. The table tennis players exhibited decreased sFC in the right middle temporal gyrus and left inferior parietal gyrus. Conversely, they displayed increased dFC from the lITG to prefrontal cortex, particularly the left middle frontal gyrus, left superior frontal gyrus-medial, and left superior frontal gyrus-dorsolateral. These findings suggest that table tennis players demonstrate altered visuomotor transformation and executive function pathways. Both pathways involve the lITG, which is a vital node in the ventral visual stream. These static and dynamic analyses provide complementary and overlapping results, which may help us better understand the neural mechanisms underlying the changes in intrinsic brain activity and network organization induced by long-term table tennis skill training.

Previous studies have explored resting‐state functional connectivity (rs‐FC) of the amygdala in patients with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, it remains unclear whether there are frequency‐specific FC alterations of the amygdala in ASD and whether FC in specific frequency bands can be used to distinguish patients with ASD from typical controls (TCs). Data from 306 patients with ASD and 314 age‐matched and sex‐matched TCs were collected from 28 sites in the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange database. The bilateral amygdala, defined as the seed regions, was used to perform seed‐based FC analyses in the conventional, slow‐5, and slow‐4 frequency bands at each site. Image‐based meta‐analyses were used to obtain consistent brain regions across 28 sites in the three frequency bands. By combining generative adversarial networks and deep neural networks, a deep learning approach was applied to distinguish patients with ASD from TCs. The meta‐analysis results showed frequency band specificity of FC in ASD, which was reflected in the slow‐5 frequency band instead of the conventional and slow‐4 frequency bands. The deep learning results showed that, compared with the conventional and slow‐4 frequency bands, the slow‐5 frequency band exhibited a higher accuracy of 74.73%, precision of 74.58%, recall of 75.05%, and area under the curve of 0.811 to distinguish patients with ASD from TCs. These findings may help us to understand the pathological mechanisms of ASD and provide preliminary guidance for the clinical diagnosis of ASD.

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Migraine—a disabling neurological disorder, imposes a tremendous burden on societies. To reduce the economic and health toll of the disease, insight into its pathophysiological mechanism is key to improving treatment and prevention. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) studies suggest abnormal functional connectivity (FC) within the default mode network (DMN) in migraine patients. This implies that DMN connectivity change may represent a biomarker for migraine. However, the FC abnormalities appear inconsistent which hinders our understanding of the potential neuropathology. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis of the FC within the DMN in migraine patients in the resting state to identify the common FC abnormalities. With efficient search and selection strategies, nine studies (published before July, 2022) were retrieved, containing 204 migraine patients and 199 healthy subjects. We meta-analyzed the data using the Anisotropic Effect Size version of Signed Differential Mapping (AES-SDM) method. Compared with healthy subjects, migraine patients showed increased connectivity in the right calcarine gyrus, left inferior occipital gyrus, left postcentral gyrus, right cerebellum, right parahippocampal gyrus, and right posterior cingulate gyrus, while decreased connectivity in the right postcentral gyrus, left superior frontal gyrus, right superior occipital gyrus, right orbital inferior frontal gyrus, left middle occipital gyrus, left middle frontal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus. These results provide a new perspective for the study of the pathophysiology of migraine and facilitate a more targeted treatment of migraine in the future.

ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to investigate the spontaneous regional neural activity abnormalities in patients with acute basal ganglia ischemic stroke (BGIS) using a multifrequency bands regional homogeneity (ReHo) method and to explore whether the alteration of ReHo values was associated with clinical characteristics.MethodsIn this study, 34 patients with acute BGIS and 44 healthy controls (HCs) were recruited. All participants were examined by resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). The ReHo method was used to detect the alterations of spontaneous neural activities in patients with acute BGIS. A two-sample t-test comparison was performed to compare the ReHo value between the two groups, and a Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to assess the relationship between the regional neural activity abnormalities and clinical characteristics.ResultsCompared with the HCs, the patients with acute BGIS showed increased ReHo in the left caudate and subregions such as the right caudate and left putamen in conventional frequency bands. In the slow-5 frequency band, patients with BGIS showed decreased ReHo in the left medial cingulum of BGIS compared to the HCs and other subregions such as bilateral caudate and left putamen. No brain regions with ReHo alterations were found in the slow-4 frequency band. Moreover, we found that the ReHo value of left caudate was positively correlated with the NIHSS score.ConclusionOur findings revealed the alterations of ReHo in patients with acute BGIS in a specific frequency band and provided a new insight into the pathogenesis mechanism of BGIS. This study demonstrated the frequency-specific characteristics of ReHo in patients with acute BGIS, which may have a positive effect on the future neuroimaging studies.