The disorder of brain-gut interaction is an important cause of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), but the dynamic characteristics of the brain remain unclear. Since there are many shortcomings for evaluating brain dynamic nature in the previous studies, we proposed a new method based on slope calculation by point-by-point analysis of the data from functional magnetic resonance imaging, and detected the abnormalities of brain dynamic changes in IBS patients. The results showed that compared with healthy subjects, there were dynamic changes in the brain for the IBS patients. After correction by false discovery rate (FDR), significant abnormalities were only found in two functional connections of the right posterior cingulate gyrus linked to left middle frontal gyrus, and the right posterior cingulate gyrus linked to left pallidus. The above results of the brain dynamic analysis were totally different from those of the brain static analysis of IBS patients. Our findings provide novel complementary information for illustrating the central nervous mechanism of IBS and may offer a new direction to explore central target for patients with IBS.
Brain/diagnostic imaging* ; Brain Mapping ; Gyrus Cinguli/diagnostic imaging* ; Humans ; Irritable Bowel Syndrome/diagnostic imaging* ; Magnetic Resonance Imaging

OBJECTIVE: To compare the effectiveness and sensitivity of entropy and regional homogeneity (ReHo) for identifying irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). METHODS: Voxel-based approximate entropy (ApEn) was calculated based on findings of resting fMRI of 54 patients with IBS and 54 healthy control subjects. Feature selection was performed using independent sample -test, and support vector machine was then used to classify and identify different groups. The classification performance obtained from ApEn was compared with that from ReHo. RESULTS: Significant differences between the two groups were found in the left triangle part of inferior prefrontal gyrus, right angular gyrus of the inferior parietal lobule, left inferior temporal gyrus, left middle temporal gyrus, left lingual gyrus, bilateral middle occipital gyrus and bilateral superior occipital gyrus for ReHo ( < 0.05), and in the bilateral postcentral gyrus, right precentral gyrus, right inferior temporal gyrus, bilateral middle temporal gyrus and left superior occipital gyrus for ApEn ( < 0.05). ApEn consistently showed better performance than ReHo regardless of the variations in the number of features. The classification accuracy, specificity and sensitivity of ApEn were 93.5185%, 90.7407% and 96.2963%, respectively, as compared with 86.1111%, 85.1852% and 87.037% of ReHo. CONCLUSIONS Entropy analysis based on fMRI can be more sensitive and effective than ReHo for identification of IBS.
Brain ; diagnostic imaging ; Brain Mapping ; Case-Control Studies ; Entropy ; Humans ; Irritable Bowel Syndrome ; diagnostic imaging ; Magnetic Resonance Imaging