Structural and functional pathology in cocaine use disorder with polysubstance use: A multimodal fusion approach structural-functional pathology in cocaine use disorder

• Published in: Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology & biological psychiatry 2024-01, Vol.128, p.110862-110862, Article 110862
• Main Authors: Rasgado-Toledo, Jalil, Duvvada, Sai Siddharth, Shah, Apurva, Ingalhalikar, Madhura, Alluri, Vinoo, Garza-Villarreal, Eduardo A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cocaine use disorder; fMRI; Graph theory; Imaging; mCCA + jICA; Multimodal fusion; sMRI
• ISSN: 0278-5846; 1878-4216
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pnpbp.2023.110862

Cocaine use disorder (CUD) is described as a compulsive urge to seek and consume cocaine despite the inimical consequences. MRI studies from different modalities have shown that CUD patients exhibit structural and/or functional connectivity pathology among several brain regions. Nevertheless, both connectivities are commonly studied and analyzed separately, which may potentially obscure its relationship between them, and with the clinical pathology. Here, we compare structural and functional brain networks in CUD patients and healthy controls (HC) using multimodal fusion. The sample consisted of 63 (8 females) CUD patients and 42 (9 females) healthy controls (HC), recruited as part of the SUDMEX CONN database. For this, we computed a battery of graph-based measures from multi-shell diffusion-weighted imaging and resting state fc-fMRI to quantify local and global connectivity. Then we used multimodal canonical component analysis plus joint independent component analysis (mCCA+jICA) to compare between techniques and evaluate group differences and its association with clinical alteration. Unimodal results showed a striatal decrease in the participation coefficient but applied supervised data fusion revealed other regions with cocaine-related alterations in joint functional communication. When performing multimodal fusion analysis, we observed a higher centrality of the interrelationship and a lower participation coefficient in patients with CUD. In contrast to the unimodal approach, the multimodal fusion method was able to reveal latent information about brain regions involved in impairment due to cocaine abuse. The present results could help in understanding the pathology of CUD to develop better pre-treatment/post-treatment intervention designs. •The combination of different modalities is important to find circuits.•We used multimodal fusion and graph theory in cocaine use disorder patients.•We found higher centrality and lower participation coefficient in patients.•Impairment in internode information communication only in joint modalities.