Cerebral Perfusion Differences in the Visual Cortex and Fusiform Subregions Across the Psychosis Spectrum

Jothini Sritharan ^1,2,3,4 Victor Zeng ^3,4 Jan Petr ⁵ Henk-Jan Mutsaerts ^6,7 Dung Hoang ^3,4 Nicolas Bolo ^4,8 Elena Ivleva ⁹ Weiying Dai ¹⁰ Elliot Gershon ¹¹ Sarah Keedy ¹¹ David Parker ¹² Rebekah Trotti ^3,4 Jennifer E. McDowell ¹² Brett A Clementz ¹² Carol A Tamminga ⁹ Godfrey Pearlson ^13,14 Matcheri S Keshavan ^4,8 Paulo Lizano ^3,4,8*

• ¹ Advanced Imaging Research, Swiss Paraplegic Research, Nottwil, Switzerland
• ² ETH Zürich, Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland
• ³ Division of Translational Neuroscience, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, United States
• ⁴ Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, United States
• ⁵ Institute for Radiopharmaceutical Cancer Research, Helmholtz Center Dresden-Rossendorf, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers (HZ), Dresden, Lower Saxony, Germany
• ⁶ Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, VU Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Netherlands
• ⁷ Amsterdam Neuroscience, Brain Imaging, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• ⁸ Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
• ⁹ Department of Psychiatry, Medical School, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas, United States
• ¹⁰ Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York, United States
• ¹¹ Department of Psychiatry, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States
• ¹² Departments of Psychology and Neuroscience, BioImaging Research Center, University of Georgia, Athens, United States
• ¹³ Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center, Institute of Living, Hartford Hospital, Hartford, Connecticut, United States
• ¹⁴ Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Yale University, New Haven, United States

Background: Approximately 50% of individuals with psychosis spectrum disorders (PSD) experience visual hallucinations and deficits in visual processing. Cerebral blood flow (CBF) alterations have been identified in the occipital lobe (OL) and fusiform gyrus (FG) in PSD.However, prior studies neither report on cytoarchitectonic subregions of the OL or FG, nor their correlations with cognition. Moreover, perfusion differences across neurobiologically defined psychosis Biotypes in these regions are not investigated yet.Methods: ExploreASL and FreeSurfer were used to extract perfusion measures from pseudocontinuous arterial spin labeling scans of visual (hOc1-hOc3v, middle temporal area (MT)) and fusiform (FG2-FG4) subregions in 122 bipolar disorder with psychosis (BP), 179 schizoaffective disorder (SAD), 203 schizophrenia (SZ), and 350 healthy controls (NC), as well as psychosis Biotypes (BT1-3). The data was adjusted for scanner effects using ComBat.Analyses were co-varied for total gray matter CBF. We used R to perform statistical comparisons across PSD and NC and across Biotypes. Partial Spearman correlation was performed between CBF and cognitive measures. Benjamini & Hochberg correction was used to correct for multiple comparisons.Results: PSD exhibited greater perfusion in MT and FG2 compared to NC. Perfusion significantly differed across psychosis Biotypes in hOc1 but not across diagnostic groups.Higher MT and FG4 perfusion in PSD were associated with worse overall cognitive performance.Conclusions: Visual and fusiform subregions demonstrate significant perfusion alterations which may indicate neurovascular deficits in PSD. Moreover, these perfusion alterations may contribute to cognitive impairments and visual abnormalities in psychosis.