Fig. 1

Flowchart. A Grey matter relationships with neighboring six voxels identified structural pattern indices. The binary symbol sequence, which represented the combination of intensity relationships, was then converted to a decimal pattern index. B Preprocessed grey matter maps were mapped using a zero-padded grey matter mask. This step ensured the retention of voxels and their neighbors for morphological similarity analysis. Subsequently, these were mapped with the grey matter mask. C We measured the IBS distances as dissimilarity between two AAL brain regions based on the probabilities and rank orders of structural patterns. D The IBS distance between the original and spatial shuffled grey matter intensities assessed the structural randomness. The stepwise regression was used to examine the relationship of the MMSE score with structural randomness. E We applied the one-sample t-test to investigate the regional structural similarity and the independent t-tests to explore group differences in inter-regional structural similarity and structural randomness. AAL: automated anatomical labeling; IBS: information-based similarity; MMSE: Mini-Mental State Examination