Increased Local Specialization of Structural Networks Revealed by Probabilistic Diffusion Tractography in Cerebral Small Vessel Disease

We used probabilistic diffusion tractography and graph theory based on DTI to investigate the topologic organization of white matter (WM) structural networks in 54 patients with severe CSVD burden (CSVD-s), 117 patients with mild CSVD burden (CSVD-m) and 73 healthy controls. Compared with CSVD-m patients and controls, CSVD-s patients exhibited significantly increased local efficiency, normalized clustering coefficient and small world index, with partially reorganized hub distributions. In addition, the CSVD-s patients showed significantly increased nodal efficiency in some brain regions. Intriguingly, the significant correlation between node efficiency and cognitive parameters existed in CSVD-m and control groups.