OBJECTIVES: Magnetic resonance diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) has important clinical value in diagnosis and curative effect evaluation on endometrial carcinoma. How to improve the detection rate of endometrial small lesions by DWI is the research focus of MRI technology. This study aims to analyze the image quality of small field MRI ZOOMit-DWI sequence and conventional single-shot echo-planar imaging (SS-EPI) DWI sequence in the scanning of endometrial carcinoma, and to explore the clinical value of ZOOMit-DWI sequence. METHODS: A total of 37 patients with endometrial carcinoma diagnosed by operation and pathology in the Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University from July 2019 to May 2021 were collected. All patients were scanned with MRI ZOOMit-DWI sequence and SS-EPI DWI sequence before operation. Two radiologists subjectively evaluated the anatomical details, artifacts, geometric deformation and focus definition of the 2 groups of DWI images. At the same time, the signal intensity were measured and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), contrast to noise ratio (CNR), and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) of the 2 DWI sequences were calculated for objective evaluation. The differences of subjective score, objective score and ADC value of the 2 DWI sequences were analyzed. RESULTS: The SNR of the ZOOMit-DWI group was significantly higher than that of the SS-EPI DWI group (301.96±141.85 vs 94.66±41.26), and the CNR of the ZOOMit-DWI group was significantly higher than that of the SS-EPI DWI group (185.05±105.45 vs 57.91±31.54, P<0.05). There was no significant difference in noise standard deviation between the ZOOMit-DWI group and the SS-EPI DWI group (P>0.05). The subjective score of anatomical detail and focus definition in the ZOOMit-DWI group was significantly higher than that of the SS-EPI DWI group (both P<0.05). The subjective score of artifacts and geometric deformation of ZOOMit-DWI group was significantly lower than that of the SS-EPI DWI group (both P<0.05). ADC had no significant difference between the ZOOMit-DWI group and the SS-EPI DWI group (P>0.05). CONCLUSIONS The image quality of ZOOMit-DWI is significantly higher than that of conventional SS-EPI DWI. In the MRI DWI examination of endometrial carcinoma, ZOOMit-DWI can effectively reduce the geometric deformation and artifacts of the image, which is more conducive to clinical diagnosis and treatment.
Female ; Humans ; Signal-To-Noise Ratio ; Endometrial Neoplasms/diagnostic imaging* ; Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging/methods* ; Endometrium ; Echo-Planar Imaging/methods* ; Reproducibility of Results

Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder influenced by many common genetic variants. Studying the genetic characteristics of schizophrenia is helpful for early prevention and individualized treatment. Previous studies on single or several gene variants in mental disorders achieved limited explanatory power. The polygenic risk score (PRS) recently promised to quantify the genetic risk of polygenic diseases by integrating the risk of all identified genetic variation loci, which has already been used to investigate on clinical features, neuroimaging and drug therapy for schizophrenia. Besides, the combination of PRS and exposome score (ES) could capture the joint effect of gene-environment interaction. Therefore, this current study systematically reviewed these applications of PRS in schizophrenia-related investigations, aiming to provide new ideas for the prevention and treatment of schizophrenia.

Objective:This study aimed to investigate the effect of short-term antipsychotic medication treatment of patients with schizophrenia on the effect of the thalamocortical resting-state functional connectivity.Methods:83 first-episode drug-na?ve schizophrenia patients and 117 matched healthy controls participated in the present study. The study collected resting-state fMRI data before and after the patients received short-term antipsychotics to assess the changes in the thalamocortical circuits and clinical symptoms. The directional interactions between the thalamus and other brain regions were investigated using a standard seed-based whole-brain correlation by choosing the bilateral thalamus as the seeds. Spearman′s correlation analysis was carried out between the change of abnormal functional connectivity and improved clinical symptoms in patients.Results:Compared with the healthy controls, schizophrenia patients showed decreased thalamic-prefrontal functional connectivity (including the middle frontal cortex, inferior frontal cortex, middle cingulate cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and inferior parietal lobe, all P<0.05, FDR corrected) and increased thalamic-sensorimotor functional connectivity(including the precentral gyrus, superior temporal cortex, middle temporal cortex, inferior temporal cortex, parahippocampus, and middle occipital cortex, all P<0.05, FDR corrected)at baseline. After short-term antipsychotic treatment, the thalamic-prefrontal hypo-connectivity was significantly enhanced, and the thalamic-sensorimotor hyper-connectivity was significantly decreased. Furthermore, the changes of abnormal functional connectivity were correlated significantly with the PANSS total score changes improvement ( r=0.435, P=0.014; r=0.394, P=0.028,uncorrected). Conclusions:The present study replicates previous findings that the abnormalities of thalamocortical circuits in schizophrenia are characterized by thalamic-prefrontal hypoconnectivity and thalamic-sensorimotor hyperconnectivity. Moreover, short-term antipsychotic treatment partly improves thalamocortical abnormalities, which further relates to clinical symptom relief; Restoring of abnormal thalamocortical circuits plays an important role in the early treatment of schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder influenced by many common genetic variants. Studying the genetic characteristics of schizophrenia is helpful for early prevention and individualized treatment. Previous studies on single or several gene variants in mental disorders achieved limited explanatory power. The polygenic risk score (PRS) recently promised to quantify the genetic risk of polygenic diseases by integrating the risk of all identified genetic variation loci, which has already been used to investigate on clinical features, neuroimaging and drug therapy for schizophrenia. Besides, the combination of PRS and exposome score (ES) could capture the joint effect of gene-environment interaction. Therefore, this current study systematically reviewed these applications of PRS in schizophrenia-related investigations, aiming to provide new ideas for the prevention and treatment of schizophrenia.

Objective:This study aimed to investigate the effect of short-term antipsychotic medication treatment of patients with schizophrenia on the effect of the thalamocortical resting-state functional connectivity.Methods:83 first-episode drug-na?ve schizophrenia patients and 117 matched healthy controls participated in the present study. The study collected resting-state fMRI data before and after the patients received short-term antipsychotics to assess the changes in the thalamocortical circuits and clinical symptoms. The directional interactions between the thalamus and other brain regions were investigated using a standard seed-based whole-brain correlation by choosing the bilateral thalamus as the seeds. Spearman′s correlation analysis was carried out between the change of abnormal functional connectivity and improved clinical symptoms in patients.Results:Compared with the healthy controls, schizophrenia patients showed decreased thalamic-prefrontal functional connectivity (including the middle frontal cortex, inferior frontal cortex, middle cingulate cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and inferior parietal lobe, all P<0.05, FDR corrected) and increased thalamic-sensorimotor functional connectivity(including the precentral gyrus, superior temporal cortex, middle temporal cortex, inferior temporal cortex, parahippocampus, and middle occipital cortex, all P<0.05, FDR corrected)at baseline. After short-term antipsychotic treatment, the thalamic-prefrontal hypo-connectivity was significantly enhanced, and the thalamic-sensorimotor hyper-connectivity was significantly decreased. Furthermore, the changes of abnormal functional connectivity were correlated significantly with the PANSS total score changes improvement ( r=0.435, P=0.014; r=0.394, P=0.028,uncorrected). Conclusions:The present study replicates previous findings that the abnormalities of thalamocortical circuits in schizophrenia are characterized by thalamic-prefrontal hypoconnectivity and thalamic-sensorimotor hyperconnectivity. Moreover, short-term antipsychotic treatment partly improves thalamocortical abnormalities, which further relates to clinical symptom relief; Restoring of abnormal thalamocortical circuits plays an important role in the early treatment of schizophrenia.