Materials and Methods: Enrolled 20 the patients of PI (15 females and 5 males) and 20 normal people (15 females and 5 males), matching age, sex and education in this stud, all participants were right-Handed. Each participant was administered Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), Self-rating Anxiety Scale, and Self-rating Depression Scale (SDS) questionnaires for the evaluation of neuropsychological performance. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and Voxal-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) to analyze the abnormal changes of functional connectivity in frontal lobe of patients with PI. The Pearson correlation test was employed to examine the correlations between the clinical rating scales and the abnormal VMHC brain area in patients.

Results: In comparison with normal peoples, abnormal functional connectivity regions were mainly concentrated in the superior frontal gyrus of orbital part (L/R), middle frontal gyrus of orbital part (L/R), inferior frontal gyrus of orbital part (L) and inferior frontal gyrus of opercular part part (L)(p < 0.05), and abnormal functional connectivity was found in middle frontal gyrus of orbital part (GFR correction, voxel P < 0.01, cluster P < 0.025) in patients with PI. There were no significant relationship between clinical rating scales and the abnormal VMHC brain area in patients (P>0.05).

Conclusion: Our study identified abnormal functional connectivity, which were mainly located in the orbitofrontal gyrus and the inferior frontal gyrus of opercular part, in the frontal lobe of patients with insomnia by resting-state functional connectivity imaging. This area are related to the impairment of decision making, value judging, reward and hedonism processing emotional processing, language function, Which is more helpful to understand the abnormal neural activity mechanism in the frontal lobe of insomnia, and provide a relatively accurate brain region basis for future prevention, diagnosis and treatment.