Introduction:

Epilepsy and Parkinson's disease have been described as disorders of neural networks. The study of connectivity by molecular modalities may be more physiologically relevant than those based on hemodynamic signals.

Aim:

The aim of the present work is to propose a methodology for the description of functional connectivity patterns from brain perfusion by single photon emission tomography.

Methods:

The methodology includes four main steps: spatial preprocessing, partial volume correction, calculation of the perfusion index and obtaining the functional connectivity matrix using Pearson's correlation coefficient. It was implemented in 25 patients with different neurological disorders: 15 with drug-resistant epilepsy and 10 suffering Parkinson's disease.

Results:

Significant differences were found between the perfusion indexes of various regions of the ipsilateral and contralateral hemispheres in both patients with frontal lobe epilepsy and patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. The same result was obtained in Parkinson's disease patients with different stages of the disease. For each group, functional connectivity patterns involving regions related to the pathology under study were identified.

Conclusions:

With the development of this methodology, it has been demonstrated that single photon emission tomography provides valuable information to study the organization of functional brain networks. Future research with a larger number of patients would contribute to make inferences about the neural correlates of the different brain disorders.

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