The children had experienced the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, a massive disaster in south central China that killed almost 70,000 people and injured more than 370,000.
Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), an MRI technique that measures th integrity of the brain’s white matter, was used to look at the brain’ connectome, or the map of the neural connections in the brain.
The human connectome includes a series of nodes, or brain regions linked by connections known as edges. Nodes with a relatively high number of edges are referred to as hubs.
Lead author of the study Qiyong Gong said, “Generally speaking, th structural connectome and the functional connectome are based on different types of raw images, which may be used to investigate th brain’s abnormalities through different views.”
Using DTI results and graph theory, a relatively simple and widel used way of modeling the human brain connectome, the researchers were able find significant structural differences between the PTSD an non-PTSD groups.