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• Clinical Article •
Quantitative imaging study of brain structural characteristics in clinical medical postgraduate students with anxiety
LI Sijia  JIANG Jingming  ZHANG Quan  HANJIAERBIEKE ·Kukun  XU Rui  WANG Yunling 

DOI:10.12015/issn.1674-8034.2026.05.010.


[Abstract] Objective To characterize structural brain alterations in clinical medical graduate students experiencing anxiety and to explore the potential association between anxiety severity and regional brain volume changes.Materials and Methods Clinical medical graduate students were prospectively recruited as the experimental group. Age- and sex- matched healthy controls and patients with a clinical diagnosis of anxiety were retrospectively selected from our institutional database to serve as healthy and anxiety control groups, respectively. Anxiety levels were evaluated using the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS). All participants underwent structural T1-weighted magnetization-prepared rapid gradient-echo (T1-MPRAGE) imaging on a 3.0 T MRI scanner. Cortical and subcortical segmentation was performed with FreeSurfer to extract regional brain volumes. Volumetric differences among the experimental, healthy control, and anxiety control groups were compared.Results Significant differences in the volumes of several brain regions were observed among the three groups (P < 0.05). Specifically, compared with the healthy control group, the subject group exhibited statistically significant volume differences (FDR-corrected, P < 0.05) in 13 brain regions, including bilateral cerebellar cortex, bilateral caudate nuclei, bilateral putamina, bilateral amygdalae, and the left hippocampus. Compared with the anxiety control group, the subject group showed significant volume differences (FDR-corrected, P < 0.05) in 14 brain regions, including bilateral cerebellar cortex, bilateral caudate nuclei, bilateral nucleus accumbens, left hippocampus, and left amygdala. Furthermore, compared with the healthy control group, the anxiety control group demonstrated significant volume differences (FDR-corrected, P < 0.05) in 14 brain regions, including bilateral cerebellar cortex, bilateral caudate nuclei, bilateral putamina, bilateral nucleus accumbens, and the left hippocampus.Conclusions Anxiety-related emotional states in clinical medical postgraduates are associated with volumetric differences in several brain regions. MRI may serve as an imaging tool for investigating anxiety-related structural brain alterations and may provide a reference for future studies on their neurophysiological basis.
[Keywords] anxiety；structural magnetic resonance imaging；magnetic resonance imaging；brain structure；clinical medical postgraduate students；radiomic features；automatic segmentation

LI Sijia   JIANG Jingming   ZHANG Quan   HANJIAERBIEKE ·Kukun   XU Rui   WANG Yunling*  

Imaging Center, the First Affiliated Hospital of Xinjiang Medical University, Urumqi 830054, China

Corresponding author: WANG Y L, E-mail: doctorwang1005@163.com

Conflicts of interest   None.

Received  2025-11-05
Accepted  2026-04-20
DOI: 10.12015/issn.1674-8034.2026.05.010
DOI:10.12015/issn.1674-8034.2026.05.010.

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