Functional reorganization during the recovery of contralesional target selection deficits after prefrontal cortex lesions in macaque monkeys

Ramina Adam; Kevin Johnston; Ravi S. Menon; Stefan Everling

NeuroImage (Feb 2020)

Functional reorganization during the recovery of contralesional target selection deficits after prefrontal cortex lesions in macaque monkeys

Ramina Adam,
Kevin Johnston,
Ravi S. Menon,
Stefan Everling

Affiliations

Ramina Adam: Graduate Program in Neuroscience, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada; Robarts Research Institute, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5B7, Canada; The Brain and Mind Institute, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada
Kevin Johnston: The Brain and Mind Institute, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada; Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada
Ravi S. Menon: Robarts Research Institute, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5B7, Canada; The Brain and Mind Institute, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada; Department of Medical Biophysics, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada
Stefan Everling: Graduate Program in Neuroscience, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada; Robarts Research Institute, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5B7, Canada; The Brain and Mind Institute, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada; Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada; Corresponding author. Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping, Robarts Research Institute, 1151, Richmond Street North, London, Ontario, N6A 5B7, Canada.

Journal volume & issue: Vol. 207
p. 116339

Abstract

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Visual extinction has been characterized by the failure to respond to a visual stimulus in the contralesional hemifield when presented simultaneously with an ipsilesional stimulus (Corbetta and Shulman, 2011). Unilateral damage to the macaque frontoparietal cortex commonly leads to deficits in contralesional target selection that resemble visual extinction. Recently, we showed that macaque monkeys with unilateral lesions in the caudal prefrontal cortex (PFC) exhibited contralesional target selection deficits that recovered over 2–4 months (Adam et al., 2019). Here, we investigated the longitudinal changes in functional connectivity (FC) of the frontoparietal network after a small or large right caudal PFC lesion in four macaque monkeys. We collected ultra-high field resting-state fMRI at 7-T before the lesion and at weeks 1–16 post-lesion and compared the functional data with behavioural performance on a free-choice saccade task. We found that the pattern of frontoparietal network FC changes depended on lesion size, such that the recovery of contralesional extinction was associated with an initial increase in network FC that returned to baseline in the two small lesion monkeys, whereas FC continued to increase throughout recovery in the two monkeys with a larger lesion. We also found that the FC between contralesional dorsolateral PFC and ipsilesional parietal cortex correlated with behavioural recovery and that the contralesional dorsolateral PFC showed increasing degree centrality with the frontoparietal network. These findings suggest that both the contralesional and ipsilesional hemispheres play an important role in the recovery of function. Importantly, optimal compensation after large PFC lesions may require greater recruitment of distant and intact areas of the frontoparietal network, whereas recovery from smaller lesions was supported by a normalization of the functional network.

Published in NeuroImage

ISSN: 1053-8119 (Print); 1095-9572 (Online)
Publisher: Elsevier
Country of publisher: United States
LCC subjects: Medicine: Internal medicine: Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Website: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/neuroimage

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