Effect of Stroke on Contralateral Functional Connectivity.

Introduction: Stroke can induce large-scale functional reorganization of the brain; however, the spatial patterns of this reorganization remain largely unknown.
Methods: Using a large (N = 116) sample of participants who were in the chronic stages of stroke, we present a systematic study of the association between brain damage and functional connectivity (FC) within the intact hemisphere. We computed correlations between regional cortical damage and contralateral FC.
Results: We identified left-hemisphere regions that had the most pronounced effect on the right-hemisphere FC, and, conversely, right-hemisphere connections where the effect of damage was particularly strong. Notably, the vast majority of significant correlations were positive: damage was associated with an increase in regional contralateral connectivity. Discussion: These findings lend evidence of the reorganization of contralateral cortical networks as a response to brain damage, which is more pronounced in a set of well-connected regions where connectivity increases with the amount of damage. Impact statement The relatively large sample size combined with our best-of-breed analysis methods provides us with sufficient statistical power and spatial sensitivity to identify a set of brain regions where damage has the strongest impact on contralateral networks, and a set of contralateral functional connections that increase in strength in response to brain damage. Our results demonstrate that the brain's ability to reorganize itself after extensive damage is not distributed equally in space, but is more likely to occur in specific core regions. We believe that the associations between brain damage and increased connectivity in the "intact" hemisphere provide novel, and important, insight into the plasticity of the adult brain.