Movie fMRI predicts socioemotional dysfunction in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia
Poster No:
238
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Jayden Lee1, Ryan Darby1
Institutions:
1Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN
First Author:
Co-Author:
Introduction:
Socioemotional dysfunction, such as loss of empathy and mentalizing/theory of mind ability, is a core clinical symptom of patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). However, investigating brain-behavior relationships for these socioemotional processes in dementia has largely been restricted to relating behavioral measures with structural neuroimaging due to the difficulty of having patients perform active fMRI tasks in the scanner. Employing naturalistic stimuli such as film is an innovative functional neuroimaging method for exploring brain function in clinical populations, but, to the best of our knowledge, has not been applied in bvFTD patients. The present fMRI study utilizes a short movie to detect patients' neural responses while processing socioemotional stimuli and provides promising evidence for a movie task to be used as a clinical tool to detect socioemotional dysfunction, such as impaired theory of mind (ToM).
Methods:
Whole-brain functional and structural MRI data were acquired on a 3.0 Tesla Phillips scanner for six bvFTD patients (4 male, age 64.2 ±12.6 yrs) and six healthy control subjects (3 male, 61.7±8.3 yrs) at VUMC. Functional images were collected with a gradient-echo EPI sequence in 39 interleaved slices (TR = 2s, TE = 30 ms, flip angle: 90) and all functional data were subsequently upsampled in normalized space to 2mm isotropic voxels. For the fMRI task, participants silently watched the animated Pixar short film "Partly Cloudy" (5.6 min duration) in the scanner. This previously-validated functional localizer (Jacoby 2016; Richardson 2018) reliably and simultaneously identifies the brain regions activated for the ToM network and Pain Matrix (empathy for pain). based on the neural activity elicited by watching the events depicted in the film. While these functional networks have been reliably extracted in healthy adults and children, still unknown is whether these networks are different in clinical populations like FTD. All participants were also administered behavioral tasks and questionnaires during the same visit as the MRI, including the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) (Davis 1983), completed by the caregiver or study informant of the participant. fMRI data were analyzed using SPM12 and were corrected for slice timing and motion and co-registered with each individual's high resolution anatomical image and normalized to the MNI template then spatially smoothed with 8mm Gaussian filter. First-level analyses were performed by applying a general linear model fitted to model brain activation in response to each of the two conditions (Mental>Pain and Pain>Mental). Second-level random effects analyses were used to examine the group-level response to the two contrasts (p<0.001, k=10, uncorrected). Region of interest analyses were conducted using the a priori "Theory of Mind Network" ROIs from Richardson 2018 (e.g., dorsal, middle and ventral medial parts of prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction).
Results:
One sample t-tests comparing group differences in average activations within ROIs revealed that bvFTD subjects showed significantly decreased fMRI activation compared to healthy controls within the ToM network (Mental>Pain condition (t(9) = -5.15, p=0.0006) (Fig.1). We also found that increased ToM network brain activation was significantly correlated with increased social cognition and mentalizing ability, as measured by IRI perspective-taking score (r=0.82, p=0.004) across the whole sample (Fig.2).
·fMRI BOLD activation group differences
·Correlations between fMRI and behavioral measures
Conclusions:
Our results show that bvFTD patients show less activation in ToM brain regions than healthy subjects during processing of ToM movie events. Additionally, decreased ToM-related neural activation was related to impaired perspective-taking ability, demonstrating a social cognition brain-behavior relationship. Our findings suggest that movie fMRI can potentially be used as an early clinical tool to detect socioemotional dysfunction.
Disorders of the Nervous System:
Neurodegenerative/ Late Life (eg. Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s) 1
Emotion, Motivation and Social Neuroscience:
Social Cognition 2
Social Neuroscience Other
Modeling and Analysis Methods:
Activation (eg. BOLD task-fMRI)
Keywords:
FUNCTIONAL MRI
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
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Please indicate below if your study was a "resting state" or "task-activation” study.
Healthy subjects only or patients (note that patient studies may also involve healthy subjects):
Was this research conducted in the United States?
Are you Internal Review Board (IRB) certified? Please note: Failure to have IRB, if applicable will lead to automatic rejection of abstract.
Were any human subjects research approved by the relevant Institutional Review Board or ethics panel? NOTE: Any human subjects studies without IRB approval will be automatically rejected.
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Provide references using APA citation style.
Jacoby, Nir, Emile Bruneau, Jorie Koster-Hale, and Rebecca Saxe. 2016. “Localizing Pain Matrix and Theory of Mind Networks with Both Verbal and Non-Verbal Stimuli.” NeuroImage 126 (February):39–48.
Richardson, Hilary, Grace Lisandrelli, Alexa Riobueno-Naylor, and Rebecca Saxe. 2018. “Development of the Social Brain from Age Three to Twelve Years.” Nature Communications 9 (1): 1027. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03399-2