This study was ethically approved by the institutional review board at Shandong Provincial Hospital, and all participants provided written informed consent. Patients with aMCI enrolled in this study met the following criteria: (1) between 50 and 80 years of age; (2) fulfilling the clinical features proposed by the 2011 revised National Institute on Aging–Alzheimer's Association (NIA-AA) criteria for MCI (Albert et al., 2011 (link)) and current patients with aMCI (MCI with memory impairments); and (3) having a score of 20 or higher on the Minimum Mental State Examination (MMSE) for elementary school and >24 in the middle school and above group, with Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) of 0.5. The exclusion criteria for participants included: (1) seizure disorders; (2) serious mental illness; (3) serious cerebrovascular diseases, traumatic brain injury, hydrocephalus, brain tumor, and white matter lesions (Fazekas ≥3); (4) alcohol or drug dependence; and (5) patients with MRI contraindications. The healthy controls were evaluated using the MMSE and CDR, and none of the controls had noticeable cognitive impairment. The diagnosis of aMCI was made by a neurologist with 8 years of experience. The MMSE and CDR evaluations were performed by a neuropsychologist with 5 years of experience blinded to the clinical information of all the participants. From December 2020 to March 2022, 20 patients with aMCI from the neurology outpatient clinic of Shandong Provincial Hospital in Jinan were recruited in our study. Twenty age- and gender-matched healthy controls (HCs) were recruited from the communities in Jinan. The patients' screening information is presented in the Supplementary Figure 1 . All participants were right-handed. This is a cross-sectional study that followed the STROBE Guideline.
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