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ㅣDaily Post = Reporter Kim Jeong-eunㅣPsychosis, which involves the experience of hallucinations and delusions, is commonly seen in severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and can also occur independently of a defined mental illness.
Latest research linking brain scans and AI-based pattern analysis has revealed the brain network that causes psychosis. The results of this study were published in the international academic journal “Molecular Psychiatry”.
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Patients suffering from psychosis may be troubled by hallucinations or delusions. Because these symptoms negatively impact patients, it is important to understand what mechanisms cause them.
However, it is not easy to study the causes of psychosis using brain scans. This is because most of these patients take antipsychotic medications for a long period of time, making it difficult to distinguish between symptom-related brain changes and drug-induced brain changes.
Accordingly, a research team including Stanford University School of Medicine in the US used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor changes in blood flow corresponding to brain cell activity in patients aged 6 to 39 years who developed psychosis due to a rare genetic disorder called 22q11.2 deletion syndrome) was used to analyze patterns that appear in the brains of psychotic patients through brain scans.
22q11.2 deletion syndrome, in which part of the 22nd chromosome is deleted, not only increases the risk of heart abnormalities, ADHD and autism, but is also known to have a 30% risk of suffering from psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia .
The research team collected brain scan data from 101 patients with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome and 900 control subjects (▲psychotic, autism and ADHD patients, not 22q11.2 deletion syndrome ▲healthy general population). For comparison, they collected brain scan data from patients with ADHD and autism and were able to analyze unique patterns of psychosis.
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The research team developed an AI algorithm to find patterns in fMRI brain scan data. And through the AI algorithm, we were able to identify common patterns of brain activity in psychosis patients with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome and patients with independent psychosis.
As a result of the analysis of the artificial intelligence algorithm, it was confirmed that characteristic patterns appear in the “salience network”, responsible for processing external stimuli, in the brains of patients with psychosis. Among the relevance networks, the insular cortex, which filters out unimportant information, and the ventral striatum, which predicts the rewards that information will bring, were found to be related.
“Dysfunction of the brain’s ‘filter’ and ‘prediction system’ is presumed to lead to hallucinations and delusions,” said Dr. Kaustub Supekar, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University and lead author of the article The findings of this study are: “Not only does it increase our understanding of the mechanisms that cause psychosis, but it may also help prevent psychoses such as schizophrenia.”
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