Cortico-subcortical interactions in schizophrenia - imaging aberrant intrinsic functional connectivity architecture

In schizophrenia psychosis, striatal hyperdopaminergia is suggested to influence brain network interaction, reflecting a correlate of aberrant prediction error based learning and salience attribution. Results provide evidence for altered striato-frontal connectivity in schizophrenia psychosis with particular relevance of dorsal striatum and anterior insula for hallucinations. These data further specify pathophysiological models based on state-specific aberrant salience processing during psychosis. Moreover, reorganization of striatal connectivity was found, implying an intrinsic connectivity bias towards the dorsal striatum relative to the ventral striatum. Aberrant striatum-cortical intrinsic network interaction is, however, not specific for the striatum, since hippocampus, amygadala, and cerebellum also show aberrant interaction patterns with cortical networks. Particularly cerebellar interactions yielded high accuracy in pattern recognition based classification. Overall, in schizophrenia, intrinsic interactions between subcortical and cortical networks are consistently altered.