Alterations of the structural covariance network in the thalamic subnuclei of non-comorbid treatment-naïve patients with major depressive disorder

The thalamus is one of the key structures involved in the pathophysiology of major depressive disorder (MDD). Most previous neuroimaging studies on MDD measured the volume of thalamus as a whole, however, the thalamus consists of multiple subnucleus with distinct function and connectivity. Recent advances in structural MRI segmentation techniques have enabled the measurement of the volumes of thalamic subnucleus with a robust, automatic approach using a Bayesian inference-based atlas-building algorithm. Using this algorithm, we aimed to investigate the alternations in volume and structural covariance networks in thalamic subnucleus in a relatively large sample of non-comorbid treatment-naïve patients with MDD.