Abstract #3580

White Matter Microstructure Correlates of Visual Working Memory in Schizophrenia Patients and Healthy Controls

Ali-Mohammad Golestani¹, Dolores Malaspina², Laura Miles¹, Nicole Peccerelli¹, Mariana Lazar¹

¹Radiology, Center for Biomedical Imaging, NYU Medical Center, New York, NY, United States; ²Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine, New York, NY, United States

Visual working memory (VWM) is one of the executive function domains that have been found to be consistently impaired in schizophrenia. Since schizophrenia is modeled as a brain connectivity disorder, we investigated the association between VWM performance and brain anatomical connectivity using Gaussian (fractional anisotropy (FA)) as well as non-Gaussian (mean kurtosis (MK), axonal water fraction (AWF), and tortuosity (Tort)) diffusion parameters in both schizophrenia patients and control subjects. MK and AWF were found to be correlated with VWM in controls, but not in patients. These findings support white matter involvement in VWM poor performance in schizophrenia.