Zhengjia Dai

Sun Yat-sen University | SYSU · Department of Psychology

Spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (SCA3) is primarily characterized by progressive cerebellar degeneration, including gray matter atrophy and disrupted anatomical and functional connectivity. The alterations of cerebellar white matter structural network in SCA3 and the underlying neurobiological mechanism remain unknown. Using a cohort of 20 patients w...

The human brain functional connectivity network (FCN) is constrained and shaped by the communication processes in the structural connectivity network (SCN). The underlying communication mechanism thus becomes a critical issue for understanding the formation and organization of the FCN. A number of communication models supported by different routing...

The functional connectome of the human brain represents the fundamental network architecture of neural activity, but its normative growth trajectory over the life course remains unknown. Here, we aggregate the largest, quality-controlled multimodal neuroimaging dataset across 119 global sites, including 33,809 task-free fMRI and structural MRI scan...

Different single personality traits have been found to be closely related to well-being, and single personality traits and well-being shared multiple neural substrates. Yet little is known about how the multi-trait profile, which better reflects individual differences in terms of taxonomy, is related to multi-faceted well-being, and whether the spo...

Background: The advances in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques motivate parsing heterogeneity in major depressive disorder (MDD) through neurophysiological subtypes (i.e., biotypes). Based on graph theories, researchers have observed the functional organization of the human brain as a complex system with modular structu...

The human brain structural network is thought to be shaped by the optimal trade-off between cost and efficiency. However, most studies on this problem have focused on only the trade-off between cost and global efficiency (i.e., integration) and have overlooked the efficiency of segregated processing (i.e., segregation), which is essential for speci...

Self-compassion is beneficial for individuals’ emotional health, but debates regarding its conceptualization are increasing. The present study aimed to explore the neural basis of self-compassion and its compassionate and uncompassionate dimensions and the indirect path from neural basis to emotional health. Structural MRI and Resting-state fMRI da...

To advance the understanding of the dynamic relationship between brain activities and emotional experiences, we examined the neural patterns of tension, a unique emotion that highly depends on how an event unfolds. Specifically, the present study explored the temporal relationship between functional connectivity patterns within and between differen...

An emerging trend is to use regression-based machine learning approaches to predict cognitive functions at the individual level from neuroimaging data. However, individual prediction models are inherently influenced by the vast options for network construction and model selection in machine learning pipelines. In particular, the brain white matter...

Previous studies have demonstrated that the brain functional modular organization, which is a fundamental feature of the human brain, would change along the adult lifespan. However, these studies assumed that each brain region belonged to a single functional module, although there has been convergent evidence supporting the existence of overlap amo...

The human brain functional connectivity network (FCN) is constrained and shaped by the information communication processes in the structural connectivity network (SCN). The underlying communication model thus becomes a critical issue for understanding structure-function coupling in the human brain. A number of communication models featuring differe...

Previous lifespan studies have demonstrated that the brain functional modular organization would change along with the adult lifespan. Yet, they assumed mutual exclusion among functional modules, ignoring convergent evidence for the existence of modular overlap. To reveal how age affects the overlapping functional modular organization, this study a...

It has been revealed that intersubject variability (ISV) in intrinsic functional connectivity (FC) is associated with a wide variety of cognitive and behavioral performances. However, the underlying organizational principle of ISV in FC and its related gene transcriptional profiles remain unclear. Using resting-state fMRI data from the Human Connec...

Objective: Schizophrenia is a heterogenous psychiatric disease, and deficit schizophrenia (DS) is a clinical subgroup with primary and enduring negative symptoms. Although previous neuroimaging studies have identified functional connectome alterations in schizophrenia, the modular organizations in DS and nondeficit schizophrenia (NDS) remains poorl...

How structural connectivity (SC) constrains and shapes functional connectivity (FC) in the human brain to support rich cognitive functions has long been a core issue in neuroscience. Although evidence accumulate to suggest that FC strength is correlated with multiple aspects of SC, few studies has analyzed the SC-to-FC relationship in a multivariat...

It has been revealed that intersubject variability (ISV) in intrinsic functional connectivity (FC) is associated with a wide variety of cognitive and behavioral performances. However, the underlying organizational principle of ISV in FC and its related gene transcriptional profiles remain unclear. Using resting-state fMRI data from the Human Connec...

It is widely believed that the formation of brain network architecture is under the pressure of optimal trade-off between reducing wiring cost and promoting communication efficiency. However, the questions of whether this trade-off exists in empirical human brain structural networks and, if so, how it takes effect are still not well understood. Her...

The frequency of brain activity modulates the relationship between the brain and human behavior. Insufficient understanding of frequency-specific features may thus lead to inconsistent explanations of human behavior. However, to date, the frequency-specific features of the human brain functional network at the whole-brain level remain poorly unders...

Background : Individuals with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) tend to worry exaggeratedly and uncontrollably about various daily routines. Previous studies have demonstrated that the GAD patients exhibited widespread alternations in both functional networks (FN) and structural networks (SN). However, the simultaneous alternations of the topologi...

It is widely believed that the formation of brain network structure is under the pressure of optimal trade-off between reducing wiring cost and promoting communication efficiency. However, the question of whether this trade-off exists in empirical human brain networks and, if so, how it takes effect is still not well understood. Here, we employed a...

The indispensability of visual working memory (VWM) in human daily life suggests its importance in higher cognitive functions and neurological diseases. However, despite the extensive research efforts, most findings on the neural basis of VWM are limited to a unimodal context (either structure or function) and have low generalization. To address th...

Background Previous studies have suggested that individuals with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) would show inefficient whole-brain communication and dysconnectivity in the fronto-parietal-subcortical sub-networks in the white matter (WM) structural network. However, these hypotheses have yet to be tested. Methods Individual WM structural netwo...

Aims Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Previous studies have demonstrated abnormalities in functional connectivity (FC) of AD under the assumption that FC is stationary during scanning. However, studies on the FC dynamics of AD, which may provide more insightful perspectives in understanding the neural mechanisms...

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is characterized by excessive and uncontrollable worry about everyday life. Prior neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that GAD is associated with disruptions in specific brain regions; however, little is known about the global functional connectivity maps in adolescents with GAD. Here, first-episode, medication...

Studies have demonstrated that the clinical manifestations of Alzheimer's disease (AD) are associated with abnormal connections in either functional connectivity networks (FCNs) or structural connectivity networks (SCNs). However, the FCN and SCN of AD have usually been examined separately, and the results were inconsistent. In this multimodal stud...

Loneliness results from lacking satisfied social connections. However, little is known how trait loneliness, which is a stable personal characteristic, is influenced by different types of social support (i.e., emotional and instrumental support) through the brain activity associated with loneliness. To explore these questions, data of resting state...

Most existing algorithms for optimizing the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are developed assuming that the sensing ranges of sensors are fixed. This paper¹ focuses on adjustable WSNs and proposes a lifetime maximization approach, in which the active periods and sensing ranges of sensors are scheduled simultaneously subject to the const...

A wealth of research on resting-state functional MRI (R-fMRI) data has revealed modularity as a fundamental characteristic of the human brain functional network. The modular structure has recently been suggested to be overlapping, meaning that a brain region may engage in multiple modules. However, not only the overlapping modular structure remains...

Recently, functional connectome studies based on resting‐state functional magnetic resonance imaging (R‐fMRI) and graph theory have greatly advanced our understanding of the topological principles of healthy and diseased brains. However, how different strategies for R‐fMRI data preprocessing and for connectome analyses jointly affect topological ch...

Independent versus interdependent self-construal is a concept that reflects how people perceive the relationship between self and other people, which has been extensively examined across disciplines. However, little evidence on the whole-brain functional connectivity pattern of independent versus interdependent self-construal has been reported. Her...

Whether and how the apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 genotype specifically modulates brain network connectivity in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) remain largely unknown. Here, we employed resting-state (‘task-free’) functional MRI and network centrality approaches to investigate local (degree centrality, DC) and global (eigenvect...

Deficit schizophrenia (DS), characterized by primary and enduring negative symptoms, has been considered as a pathophysiologically distinct schizophrenic subgroup. Neuroimaging characteristics of DS, especially functional brain network architecture, remain largely unknown. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging and graph theory approac...

Both the apolipoprotein E (APOE) ɛ4 allele and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) are considered to be risk factors for Alzheimer's disease (AD). The primary aim of this study was to determine whether the aMCI-related abnormality in gray matter (GM) cortical thickness and white matter (WM) tracts integrity would be modified by the APOE genot...

Spatial working memory (SWM) is an important component of working memory and plays an essential role in driving high-level cognitive abilities. Recent studies have demonstrated that individual SWM is associated with global brain communication. However, whether specific network nodal connectivity, such as brain hub connectivity, is involved in indiv...

Cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) are a new class of test models developed for educational assessment. They have gained growing attention in recent years for their distinctive ability to provide detailed feedback about examinees’ ability. Automatic test assembly (ATA), as in other test models, has been one of the most critical issues in the develo...

Purpose: To determine whether individuals with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) exhibit functional and structural brain alterations by using resting-state functional and structural magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Materials and Methods: This study received institutional review board approval, and all participants gave informed consent. Resting-st...

Human brain functional networks are topologically organized with nontrivial connectivity characteristics such as small-worldness and densely linked hubs to support highly segregated and integrated information processing. However, how they emerge and change at very early developmental phases remains poorly understood. Here, we used resting-state fun...

Objective: To investigate brain functional connectivity (FC) alterations in patients with clinically isolated syndromes (CIS) presenting without conventional brain MRI lesions, and to identify the FC differences between the CIS patients who converted to multiple sclerosis (MS) and those not converted during a 5-year follow-up. Methods: We recrui...

Recently, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been widely used to investigate the structures and functions of the human brain in health and disease in vivo. However, there are growing concerns about the test-retest reliability of structural and functional measurements derived from MRI data. Here, we present a test-retest dataset of multi-modal MRI...

Unlabelled: For accurate diagnosis and prognostic prediction of acquired brain injury (ABI), it is crucial to understand the neurobiological mechanisms underlying loss of consciousness. However, there is no consensus on which regions and networks act as biomarkers for consciousness level and recovery outcome in ABI. Using resting-state fMRI, we as...

Recent imaging connectomics studies have demonstrated that the spontaneous human brain functional networks derived from resting-state functional MRI (R-fMRI) include many non-trivial topological properties, such as highly efficient small-world architecture and densely connected hub regions. However, very little is known about dynamic functional con...

The objectives of this study were, first, to explore differences in brain activity between normal people and idiopathic restless legs syndrome (RLS) patients during asymptomatic periods; and, second, to determine whether administering repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to specific cortical regions would reverse any observed differe...

The multiband EPI sequence has been developed for the human connectome project to accelerate MRI data acquisition. However, no study has yet investigated the test-retest (TRT) reliability of the graph metrics of white matter (WM) structural brain networks constructed from this new sequence. Here, we employed a multiband diffusion MRI (dMRI) dataset...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated not only with regional gray matter damages, but also with abnormalities in functional integration between brain regions. Here, we employed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data and voxel-based graph-theory analysis to systematically investigate intrinsic functional connectivity patterns of w...

Relating the brain's structural connectivity (SC) to its functional connectivity (FC) is a fundamental goal in neuroscience because it is capable of aiding our understanding of how the relatively fixed SC architecture underlies human cognition and diverse behaviors. With the aid of current noninvasive imaging technologies (e.g., structural MRI, dif...

Many studies have suggested that childhood maltreatment increase risk of adulthood major depressive disorder (MDD) and predict its unfavorable treatment outcome, yet the neural underpinnings associated with childhood maltreatment in MDD remain poorly understood. Here, we seek to investigate the whole-brain functional connectivity patterns in MDD pa...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia, comprising an estimated 60-80% of all dementia cases. It is clinically characterized by impairments of memory and other cognitive functions. Previous studies have demonstrated that these impairments are associated with abnormal structural and functional connections among brain regions, l...

Recent research on Alzheimer's disease (AD) has shown that the altered structure and function of the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) provides a promising indicator of AD. However, little is known about the functional connectivity of the IPL subregions in AD subjects. In this study, we collected resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging dat...

Human brain function undergoes complex transformations across the lifespan. We employed resting-state functional MRI and graph-theory approaches to systematically chart the lifespan trajectory of the topological organization of human whole-brain functional networks in 126 healthy individuals ranging in age from 7 to 85 years. Brain networks were co...

Neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) have remarkable focal grey matter loss and hypometabolism in the posteromedial cortex (PMC), which is composed of the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex, suggesting an important association of the PMC with AD pathophysiology. Studies have also shown that the PM...

Background: Alzheimer's disease disrupts the topological architecture of whole-brain connectivity (i.e., the connectome); however, whether this disruption is present in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), the prodromal stage of Alzheimer's disease, remains largely unknown. Methods: We employed resting-state functional magnetic resonance i...

Increasing attention has recently been directed to the applications of pattern recognition and brain imaging techniques in the effective and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, most of the existing research focuses on the use of single-modal (e.g., structural or functional MRI) or single-level (e.g., brain local or connectivity...