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Meng Song

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4 papers

2 author rows

YNICL Journal 2023 Journal Article

Cortical anatomical variations, gene expression profiles, and clinical phenotypes in patients with schizophrenia

Yong Han
Yongfeng Yang
Zhilu Zhou
Xueyan Jin
Han Shi
Minglong Shao
Meng Song
Xi Su

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS: Schizophrenia (SZ) patients display significant structural brain abnormalities; nevertheless, the genetic mechanisms regulating cortical anatomical variations and their correlation with the disease phenotype are still ambiguous. STUDY DESIGN: We characterized anatomical variation using a surface-based method derived from structural magnetic resonance imaging of patients with SZ and age- and sex-matched healthy controls (HCs). Partial least-squares regression was performed across cortex regions between anatomical variation and average transcriptional profiles of SZ risk genes and all qualified genes from the Allen Human Brain Atlas. The morphological features of each brain region were correlated to symptomology variables in patients with SZ using partial correlation analysis. STUDY RESULTS: A total of 203 SZ and 201 HCs were included in the final analysis. We observed significant variation of 55 regions of cortical thickness, 23 regions of volume, 7 regions of area, and 55 regions of local gyrification index (LGI) between SZ and HC groups. Expression profiles of 4 SZ risk genes and 96 genes from all qualified genes showed a correlation to anatomical variability, however, after multiple comparisons, the correlations were no longer significant. LGI variability in multiple frontal subregions was associated with specific symptoms of SZ, whereas cognitive function involving attention/vigilance was linked to LGI variability across nine brain regions. CONCLUSIONS: Cortical anatomical variation of patients with schizophrenia is associated with gene transcriptome profiles as well as clinical phenotypes.

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YNICL Journal 2022 Journal Article

Abnormal patterns of regional homogeneity and functional connectivity across the adolescent first-episode, adult first-episode and adult chronic schizophrenia

Yongfeng Yang
Yuqing Sun
Yuliang Zhang
Xueyan Jin
Zheng Li
Minli Ding
Han Shi
Qing Liu

Functional deficits in schizophrenia (SZ) are observed prior to the onset of psychosis and differ at different stages of SZ. However, there is a paucity of studies focused on adolescent first-episode SZ (AOS), adult first-episode SZ (AFES), and adult chronic SZ (CHSZ). In this study, we investigated regional activity and corresponding functional connectivity alterations that have aimed to compare the three disease stages simultaneously. The subjects comprised 49 patients with AOS, 57 patients with AFES, 51 patients with CHSZ, 41 adolescent healthy controls, and 138 adult healthy controls. We compared regional homogeneity (ReHo) between patients at each disease stage with matched healthy controls. We focused on the shared brain regions that showed significant differences between SZ patients at the three different disease stages and healthy controls. Further analysis was conducted to explore whether the patterns of the whole brain functional connectivity alterations were similar. The putamen and medial frontal gyrus (MFG) showed consistently abnormal patterns in AOS, AFES, and CHSZ. Commonly decreased ReHo values in the MFG and increased ReHo values in the bilateral putamen were found in AOS, AFES, and CHSZ. Functional connectivity of MFG remained common abnormality in different SZ stage. In conclusion, ReHo abnormalities in the MFG and the putamen may be common abnormal patterns of brain function in the three different stages of SZ. The vmPFC-dlPFC FC abnormality common occurs in adolescence and adulthood.. This study may provide a more comprehensive understanding of the neurodevelopmental abnormality across the AOS, AFES, and CHSZ.

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IROS Conference 2012 Conference Paper

Natural feature based localization in forested environments

Meng Song
Fengchi Sun
Karl Iagnemma

This paper presents a new feature based scan matching method for solving 6D localization problem in forested environments. The proposed registration process includes two steps. First, the largest group of approximately parallel tree trunk features is utilized to align successive scans along the five dimensions except z direction. Tree correspondences are established by matching point patterns which are abstracted from the position relationships of trees. The optimal 5D transformation is thus determined based on the axes of two key tree pairs which are selected by evaluating their ability of tree alignment. Second, we assign the ground points of two scans into a grid of cells, and minimize z-direction difference of points in shared cells. The experimental results on data collected in real forested environments have demonstrated the effectiveness of this method.

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ICRA Conference 2012 Conference Paper

Natural landmark extraction in cluttered forested environments

Meng Song
Fengchi Sun
Karl Iagnemma

In this paper, a new systematical method for extracting tree trunk landmarks from 3D point clouds of cluttered forested environments is proposed. This purely geometric method is established on scene understanding and automatic analysis of trees. The pipeline of our method includes three steps. First, the raw point clouds are segmented by utilizing the circular shape of trees, and segments are grouped into tree sections based on the principle of spatial proximity. Second, circles and axes are extracted from tree sections which are subject to loss of shape information. Third, by clustering and integrating the tree sections resulted from various space inconsistencies, straight tree trunk landmarks are finally formed for future localization. The experimental results from real forested environments are presented.

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