613 research outputs found
Learning and comparing functional connectomes across subjects
Functional connectomes capture brain interactions via synchronized
fluctuations in the functional magnetic resonance imaging signal. If measured
during rest, they map the intrinsic functional architecture of the brain. With
task-driven experiments they represent integration mechanisms between
specialized brain areas. Analyzing their variability across subjects and
conditions can reveal markers of brain pathologies and mechanisms underlying
cognition. Methods of estimating functional connectomes from the imaging signal
have undergone rapid developments and the literature is full of diverse
strategies for comparing them. This review aims to clarify links across
functional-connectivity methods as well as to expose different steps to perform
a group study of functional connectomes
Markov models for fMRI correlation structure: is brain functional connectivity small world, or decomposable into networks?
Correlations in the signal observed via functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
(fMRI), are expected to reveal the interactions in the underlying neural
populations through hemodynamic response. In particular, they highlight
distributed set of mutually correlated regions that correspond to brain
networks related to different cognitive functions. Yet graph-theoretical
studies of neural connections give a different picture: that of a highly
integrated system with small-world properties: local clustering but with short
pathways across the complete structure. We examine the conditional independence
properties of the fMRI signal, i.e. its Markov structure, to find realistic
assumptions on the connectivity structure that are required to explain the
observed functional connectivity. In particular we seek a decomposition of the
Markov structure into segregated functional networks using decomposable graphs:
a set of strongly-connected and partially overlapping cliques. We introduce a
new method to efficiently extract such cliques on a large, strongly-connected
graph. We compare methods learning different graph structures from functional
connectivity by testing the goodness of fit of the model they learn on new
data. We find that summarizing the structure as strongly-connected networks can
give a good description only for very large and overlapping networks. These
results highlight that Markov models are good tools to identify the structure
of brain connectivity from fMRI signals, but for this purpose they must reflect
the small-world properties of the underlying neural systems
Hierarchical modularity in human brain functional networks
The idea that complex systems have a hierarchical modular organization
originates in the early 1960s and has recently attracted fresh support from
quantitative studies of large scale, real-life networks. Here we investigate
the hierarchical modular (or "modules-within-modules") decomposition of human
brain functional networks, measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) in 18 healthy volunteers under no-task or resting conditions. We used a
customized template to extract networks with more than 1800 regional nodes, and
we applied a fast algorithm to identify nested modular structure at several
hierarchical levels. We used mutual information, 0 < I < 1, to estimate the
similarity of community structure of networks in different subjects, and to
identify the individual network that is most representative of the group.
Results show that human brain functional networks have a hierarchical modular
organization with a fair degree of similarity between subjects, I=0.63. The
largest 5 modules at the highest level of the hierarchy were medial occipital,
lateral occipital, central, parieto-frontal and fronto-temporal systems;
occipital modules demonstrated less sub-modular organization than modules
comprising regions of multimodal association cortex. Connector nodes and hubs,
with a key role in inter-modular connectivity, were also concentrated in
association cortical areas. We conclude that methods are available for
hierarchical modular decomposition of large numbers of high resolution brain
functional networks using computationally expedient algorithms. This could
enable future investigations of Simon's original hypothesis that hierarchy or
near-decomposability of physical symbol systems is a critical design feature
for their fast adaptivity to changing environmental conditions
Cerebellar Functional Parcellation Using Sparse Dictionary Learning Clustering
10.3389/fnins.2016.00188Frontiers in neuroscience10188GUSTO (Growing up towards Healthy Outcomes
- …