Altered white matter integrity and functional connectivity of hyperacute-stage cerebral ischemia in a rat model

Ischemic stroke is accompanied by structural deformation and functional deficits in the affected hemisphere. Within a couple of hours after symptom onset, the accurate identification of brain characteristics is critical to design the therapeutic strategies and it can potentially improve overall brain tissue viability by minimizing irreversible brain damage. In this study, white matter integrity and functional connectivity within 2–4 h after right middle cerebral artery occlusion in rats were investigated using multimodal magnetic resonance imaging. During this stage, diffusion tensor image (DTI) revealed that fractional anisotropy along the ipsilesional external capsule was slightly increased as compared with preoperative baseline. Resting state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) showed that the inter-hemispheric functional connectivities from primary motor (M1), primary somatosensory of forelimb (S1FL), and barrel field (S1BF) seeds were considerably reduced at the hyperacute stage. Fractional amplitudes of low frequency fluctuations (fALFF) from rs-fMRI were significantly enhanced at the hyperacute stage in the frequency spectrum between 0.01 and 0.08 Hz. In addition, the changes in fALFF were negatively correlated with the number of functionally connected voxels in M1, S1FL and S1BF. Our results suggest that these techniques are useful tools to evaluate remarkable brain changes in the hyperacute stage of ischemic stroke.