• Hussam Metwali, Mathijs Raemaekers, Tamer Ibrahim, and Amir Samii.
• Department of Neurosurgery, International Neuroscience Institute, Hannover, Germany; Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, Magdeburg, Germany. Electronic address: drhussamm@yahoo.com.
• World Neurosurg. 2020 Jun 1; 138: e66-e71.

ObjectiveMeasuring functional connectivity (FC) and resting state networks (RSNs) using resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging is a method of preoperative planning in patients with brain tumors. However, the baseline FC and RSNs are altered in patients with brain tumors. In this study, we examined changes in inter-network FC in patients with brain tumors.MethodsWe performed region of interest (ROI) analysis of FC in 34 patients with supratentorial gliomas and 14 healthy subjects. We performed bivariate correlation analyses at the level of each subject. Resulting correlations were Fischer Z-transformed. The used nodes included 132 ROIs from the automated anatomical labeling atlas in addition to 32 ROIs representing the different functional brain networks. We investigated second-level effects by contrasting dummy encoded covariates representing the effects of group membership on functional connectivity. The significant 2-sided P value with corrected false discovery rate was set to 0.05. We set the t contrast between the group of patients with brain tumors and the group of healthy subjects to detect the effects of tumors on inter-network connectivity.ResultsOverall, the inter-network FC was significantly higher in patients with brain tumors compared with healthy subjects. The anterior and posterior cerebellar networks, as well as the supratentorial network, showed significantly higher connectivity in patients with brain tumors than in healthy subjects.ConclusionAlthough brain tumors affect the FC and RSNs, the current study showed higher baseline inter-network connectivity in patients with brain tumors, which could indicate an intrinsic neural compensatory mechanism.Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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