Additional Brain Functional Network in Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: A Phase Synchrony Analysis

We develop a method to construct a new type of functional networks by the usage of phase synchrony degree that is different from the widely used Pearson's correlation approach. By a series of very strict statistical tests, we found that there is an additional network in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) subjects, superimposing the original (normal) brain functional network corresponding to healthy controls. The additional network leads to the increase in clustering coefficient, cost, local efficiency, and global efficiency. Our findings are inconsistent with many previous researches (using the Pearson's correlation approach) revealing both increased and decreased functional connections between brain regions and many reports revealing that the brain functional networks of ADHD patients have slow information flow and low global efficiency. We also confirm that the additional network in ADHD subjects contains 6 communities, and three of them are associated with emotional control, sensory information integration, and motor control, respectively. Furthermore, we find that there is a pathway connecting the left insula and left anterior cingular gyrus via the frontal gyrus and putamen in the additional network in ADHD subjects. This implies that due to the pathway connecting brain regions in the salience network, the ADHD patients are more sensitive to external stimuli or internal thoughts and are easier to switch to the executive network and hence harder to inhibit. For clinical diagnostic purposes, we apply the-means clustering method to distinguish ADHD patients with healthy controls at the individual subject level, and obtain a meaningful diagnostic result. More interestingly, we find that the suggested technique using phase synchrony degree to construct functional networks may obtain higher classification accuracy than the method using the Pearson's correlation coefficient.