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Heterogeneity of Thalamus-Default Mode Network Connectivity in Schizophrenia

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Milong Zhao¹ (milong45@outlook.com); ¹UC Davis

Schizophrenia has increasingly been recognized as a heterogeneous disorder. However, most functional connectivity (FC) studies have focused on mean group differences relative to healthy controls. In this study, we quantified pattern similarity between subject-specific thalamus-to-default mode network (DMN) connectivity profiles and group-level templates to examine the individual-level organization of thalamic connectivity, thereby complementing traditional mean-based FC analyses in schizophrenia. We used preprocessed COBRE resting-state fMRI data (Figshare). We contrasted 74 healthy controls (HC) with 72 patients with schizophrenia (SZ) by modeling mean thalamus-to-DMN functional connectivity (FC) as the dependent variable, group (HC vs. SZ) as a between-subject factor, and hemisphere (left vs. right thalamus) as a within-subject factor in a linear mixed-effects model. We calculated pattern similarity separately for each hemisphere by computing the correlation coefficient between each subject’s connectivity vector and the corresponding group-level template; to reduce circularity, templates were computed in a leave-one-out manner. We also assessed inter-individual heterogeneity in pattern similarity using Levene’s test for equality of variance between groups. Mean thalamus–DMN FC did not differ significantly between HC and SZ (p=0.787), although a main effect of hemisphere was observed (p=0.022), with no group-by-hemisphere interaction (p=0.412). In contrast, SZ showed a statistically significant reduction in thalamus–DMN pattern similarity relative to HC (LOO + Fisher z: p=0.000402), with no significant group-by-hemisphere interaction (p=0.368). SZ also demonstrated increased inter-individual heterogeneity in pattern similarity, especially in the right hemisphere (Levene: left p = 0.0118; right p=0.000004), suggesting that group-average connectivity patterns may poorly represent individual thalamus–DMN organization in schizophrenia.

Topic Area: METHODS: Neuroimaging