Altered Functional Connectivity of Fusiform Gyrus in Subjects with Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Resting-State fMRI Study

Visual cognition such as face recognition requests a high degree of functional integration between distributed brain areas of a network. It has been reported that the fusiform gyrus (FG) is an important brain area involved in facial cognition; altered connectivity of FG to some other regions may lead to a deficit in visual cognition especially face recognition. However, whether functional connectivity between the FG and other brain areas changes remains unclear in the resting state in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) subjects. Here, we employed a resting-state functional MRI (fMRI) to examine alterations in functional connectivity of left/right FG comparing aMCI patients with age-matched control subjects. Forty-eight aMCI and 38 control subjects from the Alzheimer’s disease Neuroimaging Initiative were analyzed. We concentrated on the correlation between low frequency fMRI time courses in the FG and those in all other brain regions. Relative to the control group, we found some discrepant regions in the aMCI group which presented increased or decreased connectivity with the left/right FG including the left precuneus, left lingual gyrus, right thalamus, supramarginal gyrus, left supplementary motor area, left inferior temporal gyrus, and left parahippocampus. More importantly, we also obtained that both left and right FG have increased functional connections with the left middle occipital gyrus (MOG) and right anterior cingulate gyrus (ACC) in aMCI patients. That was not a coincidence and might imply that the MOG and ACC also play a critical role in visual cognition, especially face recognition. These findings in a large part supported our hypothesis and provided a new insight in understanding the important subtype of MCI.