Biology subjects

van Wingen, G.

Publications and source records attributed to van Wingen, G..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Understanding the development of neural abnormalities in adolescents with mental health problems: a longitudinal study

Many mental health problems are neurodevelopmental in nature and have an onset during childhood. Mental health disorders are associated with neural abnormalities, but it is unclear when those emerge and how this relates to the development of different mental health problems. We used data from the largest longitudinal neurodevelopmental study to identify the structural and functional brain changes that co-occur with the onset of six mental health problems. The results showed premorbid brain-wide abnormalities that were comparable between internalizing and different from externalizing problems, and differential neurodevelopmental trajectories for specific brain regions in 11- to 12-year-old adolescents who developed ADHD, conduct, depressive and oppositional defiant problems. These results reveal that the onset of different mental health problems co-occur with common as well as problem-specific brain abnormalities.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Harmonization techniques for machine learning studies using multi-site functional MRI data

In recent years, the collection and sharing of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets across multiple centers have enabled studying psychiatric disorders at scale, and prompted the application of statistically powerful tools such as deep neural networks. Yet, multi-center datasets introduce non-biological heterogeneity that can confound the biological signal of interest and produce erroneous findings. To mitigate this problem, the neuroimaging community has adopted harmonization techniques previously proposed in other domains to remove site-effects from fMRI data. The reported success of these approaches in improving the generalization of the models have varied significantly. It remains unclear whether harmonization techniques could boost the final outcome of multi-site fMRI studies, to what extent, and which approaches are best suited for this task. In an attempt to objectively answer these questions, we conduct a standardized rigorous evaluation of seven different harmonization techniques from the neuroimaging and computer vision literature on two large-scale multi-site datasets (N = 2169 and N = 2366) to diagnose autism spectrum disorder and major depression disorder from static and dynamic representations of fMRI data. Interestingly, while all harmonization techniques removed site-effects from the data, they had little influence on disorder classification performance in standard k-fold and leave-one-site-out validation settings over a well-tuned baseline. Further investigation shows that the baseline model implicitly learns site-invariant features which could well explain its competitiveness with explicit harmonization techniques and suggest orthogonality between latent disease features and site discrminative features. However, additional experiments show that harmonization methods could be critical to report faithful results in settings where there is high intra-site class imbalance and the learning algorithm is prone to overfit on spurious features confounding the final outcome of the study.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Atypical development of subcortico-cortical effective connectivity in autism

Hypersensitivity, stereotyped behaviors and attentional problems in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are compatible with inefficient filtering of undesired or irrelevant sensory information at early stages of neural processing. This could stem from delays in the neurotypical development of the functional segregation between cortical and subcortical brain processes, as suggested by previous findings of overconnectivity between primary sensory regions and deep brain nuclei in ASD. To test this hypothesis, we used dynamic causal modelling to quantify the effect of age on the development of (1) cortical functional segregation from subcortical activity and (2) directional influence of subcortical activity on cortical processing in 166 participants with ASD and 193 typically developing controls (TD) from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE). We found that in TD participants age was significantly associated with increased functional segregation of cortical sensory processing from subcortical activity, paralleled by a decreased influence of subcortical activity on cortical processing. Instead these effects were highly reduced and mostly absent in ASD participants, suggesting a delayed or arrested development of the segregation between subcortical and cortical sensory processing in ASD. This atypical configuration of subcortico-cortical connectivity in ASD can result in an excessive amount of unprocessed sensory information relayed to the cortex, which is likely to impact cognitive functioning in everyday situations where it is beneficial to limit the influence of basic sensory information on cognitive processing, such as activities requiring focused attention or social interactions.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Deep brain stimulation modulates directional frontolimbic connectivity in obsessive-compulsive disorder

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is effective for patients with treatment-refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder. DBS of the ventral anterior limb of the internal capsule (vALIC) rapidly improves mood and anxiety with optimal stimulation parameters. To understand these rapid effects of vALIC-DBS, we studied functional interactions within the affective amygdala circuit. We compared resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging data during chronic stimulation versus one week of stimulation discontinuation in patients, and obtained two resting state scans from matched healthy volunteers to account for test-retest effects. Imaging data were analyzed using functional connectivity analysis and dynamic causal modelling. Improvement in mood and anxiety following DBS was associated with reduced amygdala-insula functional connectivity. Directional connectivity analysis revealed that DBS increased the impact of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex on the amygdala, and decreased the impact of the amygdala on the insula. These results highlight the importance of the amygdala circuit in the pathophysiology of OCD, and suggest a neural systems model through which negative mood and anxiety are modulated by vALIC-DBS for OCD and possibly other psychiatric disorders.\n\nOne Sentence SummaryDeep brain stimulation improves mood and anxiety in obsessive-compulsive disorder by altering connectivity between the amygdala, insula and prefrontal cortex.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

The effect of acute stress on the balance between goal-directed and habit networks in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The classical cognitive-behavioral theory of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) holds that compulsions are performed to reduce distress that is evoked by obsessions, whereas a recent neuroscience-inspired theory suggests that compulsivity results from a disbalance between goal-directed and habit-related neural networks. To bridge these theories, we investigated whether the balance between goal-directed and habit networks in patients with OCD was affected in the late aftermath of stress. Twenty-three OCD patients and twenty-three healthy controls participated in a controlled stress induction paradigm using the socially evaluated cold-pressor test in a crossover design. Stress responses were evaluated through cortisol levels, blood pressure, and anxiety ratings. Functional connectivity of the caudate nucleus and posterior putamen was assessed using seed region analysis of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data, which are hubs of the goal-directed and habit network, respectively. Stress induction increased blood pressure and psychological stress measures across groups and resulted in blunted cortisol responses in patients. Furthermore, patients showed a blunted reduction in connectivity between the caudate nucleus and precuneus in the aftermath of stress, which was positively correlated with compulsivity but not obsession severity. The posterior putamen showed no significant group differences in stress-induced connectivity. These results suggest that compulsivity in OCD in the aftermath of stress is associated with altered connectivity between the goal-directed and default mode networks.

neuroscience↗