Previous diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies have detected white matter (WM) integrity abnormalities in some specific fibre bundles in acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) patients with chemotherapy. However, little is known about the changes in the topological organization of the WM structural network in ALL patients with chemotherapy. In the present study, we acquired DTI datasets from 28 ALL patients (mean age: 40.71 ± 8.58 years, years since diagnosis: 7-38) with chemotherapy and 20 matched healthy controls (mean age: 42.95 ± 6.39 years) and performed WM network analysis using a deterministic fibre-tracking approach. Graph theoretical analysis was used to compare the topological parameters of the WM networks between the two groups. Both ALL patients with chemotherapy and healthy controls had small-worldness in their WM networks. ALL patients showed significantly reduced global network efficiency, as indicated by the abnormally decreased clustering coefficient Cp and the normalized clustering coefficient γ and increased shortest path length Lp compared with healthy controls. Moreover, hubs were located more in parietal regions of healthy controls and in temporal regions in the ALL patients. We revealed the abnormal topological organization of the WM networks of ALL patients with chemotherapy, which may improve our understanding of the neural mechanism of chemotherapy in ALL from a WM topological organization level.
Keywords: acute lymphoblastic leukaemia; chemotherapy; diffusion tensor imaging; network; white matter.