146 lumbar disc herniation patients with chronic pain (LDH-CP) and 165
healthy controls (HC) participated in this study and their brain anatomical and
resting-state functional MRI images were acquired, of which 10 LDH-CPs and 8 HCs
were excluded based on quality control (QC) (expounded in 2.5). The 136
QC-passed LDH-CPs were allocated to either the discovery or the validation group
with matched age, gender, education level, current smoking status, pain duration
and three pain-related components (the details are in 2.7). For each group, 68
HCs were randomly chosen from the pool of 157 QC-passed HCs with matched age and
gender to its corresponding LDH-CP group. As an external reference group, 272
age- and gender-matched HCs were chosen from NITRC 1000 Connectome project
database.