Higher brain structural heterogeneity in schizophrenia

As a highly heterogeneous disorder, schizophrenia shows notable interindividual variation in clinical manifestations. On that account, an increasing number of studies begin to examine the interindividual variability in neuroimaging characterization in schizophrenia. However, whether schizophrenia demonstrates higher interindividual morphological variability than health controls (HCs) remains unknown. T1-weighted anatomical images were obtained from patients with schizophrenia (n = 61) and matched HCs (n = 73). For each subject, voxel-wise gray matter volume was obtained using voxel-based morphometry analysis. We first inquired whether patients with schizophrenia showed higher interindividual structural variation than HCs using the person based similarity index (PBSI). Then, we examined differences of voxel-wise morphological coefficient of variation (CV) between schizophrenia and HCs. To further associate identified regions showing higher variability in schizophrenia with cognitive/functional processes, functional annotation was performed. Patients with schizophrenia exhibited lower PBSIs than matched HCs, suggesting higher interindividual morphological variability in schizophrenia. The following results showed that patients with schizophrenia exhibited higher CVs than HCs in distributed brain regions including the striatum, hippocampus, thalamus, parahippocampa gyrus, frontal gyrus, and amygdala. Brain regions showing higher CVs in schizophrenia were significantly implicated in affective, incentive and reward related terms. These results provide a new insight into the high clinical heterogeneity and facilitate personalized diagnose and treatment in schizophrenia.