Abnormal developmental trajectories under multimodal brain networks in ASD

Purpose: Emerging evidence suggests structural and functional brain networks are disrupted during the development of ASD patients. As the importance of age in ASD has been firmly established, children and young adults with ASD constitute a high-risk population. Due to the limitations of single-site sample data, this study proposed and applied two methods to investigate the abnormal development of connectome tissue in adolescents with ASD affected by age at multiple sites.Subjects and Methods: A total of 140 subjects were included in our study, including 76 ASD patients and 64 normal controls. All the data of the subjects were obtained from the public dataset ABIDE II website and contain simultaneously structural DTI data, T1-weighted data, and resting-state fMRI data. In this paper, we first used graph theory to analyze and reconstruct the anatomical structure and functional brain network and then explored the abnormal brain regions of ASD patients with age from two perspectives: SC-Proportion and SC-FC Coupling.Results: It was found that ASD showed age-related abnormalities in the whole brain compared with the NC group, and SC-FC Coupling values of ASD were significantly higher than those of NC in childhood but decreased significantly with age. We further found that the abnormal changes in whole-brain Coupling values were mainly caused by the abnormal development of RC and Local tissues. In addition, we found abnormal development of RC tissues in ASD at the structural level.Conclusion: The present study showed that the anatomical RC tissue development in ASD patients was abnormal at the whole brain level. This finding suggests that the brain anatomy of the RC system is affected in high-risk children and adolescents, reflecting one of the connectome characteristics of developmental risk in ASD patients.