Abnormal Spatial and Temporal Overlap of Time-Varying Brain Functional Networks in Patients with Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a complex psychiatric disorder with unclear etiology and pathological features. Neuroscientists are increasingly proposing that schizophrenia is an abnormality in the dynamic organization of brain networks. Previous studies have found that the dynamic brain networks of people with SZ are abnormal in both space and time. However, little is known about the interactions and overlaps between hubs of the brain underlying spatiotemporal dynamics. In this study, we aimed to investigate different patterns of spatial and temporal overlap of hubs between SZ patients and healthy individuals. Specifically, we obtained resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from the public dataset for 43 SZ patients and 49 healthy individuals. We derived a representation of time-varying functional connectivity using the Jackknife Correlation (JC) method. We employed the Betweenness Centrality (BC) method to identify the hubs of the brain's functional connectivity network. We then applied measures of temporal overlap, spatial overlap, and hierarchical clustering to investigate differences in the organization of brain hubs between SZ patients and healthy controls. Our findings suggest significant differences between SZ patients and healthy controls at the whole-brain and subnetwork levels. Furthermore, spatial overlap and hierarchical clustering analysis showed that quasi-periodic patterns were disrupted in SZ patients. Analyses of temporal overlap revealed abnormal pairwise engagement preferences in the hubs of SZ patients. These results provide new insights into the dynamic characteristics of the network organization of the SZ brain.