The brain regions are highly interconnected by axonal connectivity and would covary in the morphological features as a result of sharing trophic, genetic, and neurodevelopmental influences ( Alexander-Bloch et al., 2013). However, these studies can only reflect the localized changes, and the interrelationship of the altered brain regions remains largely unknown. Currently, many sMRI studies have found significant abnormalities in a wide range of brain regions in PD patients using different morphometric features such as gray matter volume ( Camicioli et al., 2009 Pan et al., 2012), cortical thickness ( Ibarretxe-Bilbao et al., 2012 Uribe et al., 2018), local gyrification index (LGI) ( Zhang et al., 2014 Sterling et al., 2016), and local fractional dimension ( Li et al., 2020). As the disease progresses, Lewy pathology gradually spreads from mid-brain nucleus to widespread cortical regions leading to structural abnormalities ( Braak et al., 2003 McCann et al., 2016). The main pathological feature of PD is the progressive apoptosis of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta due to the abnormal intracellular accumulation of α-synuclein known as Lewy pathology.

Parkinson's disease is a chronic neurodegenerative disease, characterized by a diverse array of motor and non-motor symptoms ( Sveinbjornsdottir, 2016). Taken together, these findings indicated an abnormal topological organization of SD-based SCNs in PD patients, which may contribute in understanding the pathophysiology of PD at the network level. In addition, we also found the increased assortativity and reduced robustness under a random attack in PD patients compared to HC. Moreover, the degree distribution analysis showed more high-degree nodes in PD patients. Compared with HC, PD patients showed increased normalized clustering coefficient and normalized path length, as well as a reorganization of degree-based and betweenness-based hubs (i.e., less frontal hubs). SCNs were constructed by thresholding SD correlation matrices of 68 regions and analyzed using graph theoretical approaches. In this study, we used SD to investigate the topological alterations of SCNs in 60 PD patients and 56 age- and gender-matched healthy controls (HC). However, the sulcal depth (SD)-based SCNs have not been investigated. Recent research on Parkinson's disease (PD) has demonstrated the topological abnormalities of structural covariance networks (SCNs) using various morphometric features from structural magnetic resonance images (sMRI). 2Department of Neurology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, China.1Department of Radiology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, China.Erlei Wang 1 †, Yujing Jia 1 †, Yang Ya 1, Jin Xu 1, Chengjie Mao 2, Weifeng Luo 2, Guohua Fan 1 * and Zhen Jiang 1 *

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