At the inception of human brain mapping, two principles of functional anatomy underwrote most conceptions - and analyses - of distributed brain responses: namely functional segregation and integration. There are currently two main approaches to characterising functional integration. The first is a mechanistic modelling of connectomics in terms of directed effective connectivity that mediates neuronal message passing and dynamics on neuronal circuits. The second phenomenological approach usually characterises undirected functional connectivity (i.e., measurable correlations), in terms of intrinsic brain networks, self-organised criticality, dynamical instability, etc. This paper describes a treatment of effective connectivity that speaks to the emergence of intrinsic brain networks and critical dynamics. It is predicated on the notion of Markov blankets that play a fundamental role in the self-organisation of far from equilibrium systems. Using the apparatus of the renormalisation group, we show that much of the phenomenology found in network neuroscience is an emergent property of a particular partition of neuronal states, over progressively larger scales. As such, it offers a way of linking dynamics on directed graphs to the phenomenology of intrinsic brain networks.
Brain atlases are a ubiquitous tool used for analyzing and interpreting brain imaging datasets. Traditionally, brain atlases divided the brain into regions separated by anatomical landmarks. In the last decade, several attempts have been made to parcellate the brain into regions with distinct functional activity using fMRI. To construct a brain atlas using fMRI, data driven algorithms are used to group voxels with similar functional activity together to form regions. Hierarchical clustering is one parcellation method that has been used for functional parcellation of the brain, resulting in par…
Functional neuroimaging studies have lead to understanding the brain as a collection of spatially segregated functional networks. It is thought that each of these networks is in turn composed of a set of distinct sub-regions that together support each network's function. Considering the sub-regions to be an essential part of the brain's functional architecture, several strategies have been put forward that aim at identifying the functional sub-units of the brain by means of functional parcellations. Current parcellation strategies typically employ a bottom-up strategy, creating a parcellation …
What can we hope to learn about brains from the free energy principle? In adopting the "primordial soup" physical model, Bruineberg et al. perpetuate the unsupported notion that the free energy principle has a meaningful physical--and neuronal--interpretation. We examine how minimization of free energy arises in physical contexts, and what this can and cannot tell us about brains.
Recent characterisations of self-organising systems depend upon the presence of a Markov blanket: a statistical boundary that mediates the interactions between what is inside of and outside of a system. We leverage this idea to provide an analysis of partitions in neuronal systems. This is applicable to brain architectures at multiple scales, enabling partitions into single neurons, brain regions, and brain-wide networks. This treatment is based upon the canonical micro-circuitry used in empirical studies of effective connectivity, so as to speak directly to practical applications. This depend…
The Institute for Information Transmission Problems（信息传输问题研究所）；National Research University Higher School of Economics（国立研究型高等经济大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）
We present two related methods for deriving connectivity-based brain atlases from individual connectomes. The proposed methods exploit a previously proposed dense connectivity representation, termed continuous connectivity, by first performing graph-based hierarchical clustering of individual brains, and subsequently aggregating the individual parcellations into a consensus parcellation. The search for consensus minimizes the sum of cluster membership distances, effectively estimating a pseudo-Karcher mean of individual parcellations. We assess the quality of our parcellations using (1) Kullba…
We take an image science perspective on the problem of determining brain network connectivity given functional activity. But adapting the concept of image resolution to this problem, we provide a new perspective on network partitioning for individual brain parcellation. The typical goal here is to determine densely-interconnected subnetworks within a larger network by choosing the best edges to cut. We instead define these subnetworks as resolution cells, where highly-correlated activity within the cells makes edge weights difficult to determine from the data. Subdividing the resolution estima…
Functional Magnetic Resonance Images acquired during resting-state provide information about the functional organization of the brain through measuring correlations between brain areas. Independent components analysis is the reference approach to estimate spatial components from weakly structured data such as brain signal time courses; each of these components may be referred to as a brain network and the whole set of components can be conceptualized as a brain functional atlas. Recently, new methods using a sparsity prior have emerged to deal with low signal-to-noise ratio data. However, even…
We present a hybrid method that performs the complete parcellation of the cerebral cortex of an individual, based on the connectivity information of the white matter fibers from a whole-brain tractography dataset. The method consists of five steps, first intra-subject clustering is performed on the brain tractography. The fibers that make up each cluster are then intersected with the cortical mesh and then filtered to discard outliers. In addition, the method resolves the overlapping between the different intersection regions (sub-parcels) throughout the cortex efficiently. Finally, a post-pro…
Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) exploits the anisotropic diffusion of water molecules in the brain to enable the estimation of the brain's anatomical fiber tracts at a relatively high resolution. In particular, tractographic methods can be used to generate whole-brain anatomical connectivity matrix where each element provides an estimate of the connectivity strength between the corresponding voxels. Structural brain networks are built using the connectivity information and a predefined brain parcellation, where the nodes of the network represent the brain regions and the edge weight…
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington, United States（德克萨斯理工大学计算机科学与工程系，美国）；School of Computing, University of Georgia, United States（佐治亚大学计算机学院，美国）
Bayesian theories of biological and brain function speculate that Markov blankets (a conditional independence separating a system from external states) play a key role for facilitating inference-like behaviour in living systems. Although it has been suggested that Markov blankets are commonplace in sparsely connected, nonequilibrium complex systems, this has not been studied in detail. Here, we show in two different examples (a pair of coupled Lorenz systems and a nonequilibrium Ising model) that sparse connectivity does not guarantee Markov blankets in the steady-state density of nonequilibri…
The assessment of brain fingerprints has emerged in the recent years as an important tool to study individual differences and to infer quality of neuroimaging datasets. Studies so far have mainly focused on connectivity fingerprints between different brain scans of the same individual. Here, we extend the concept of brain connectivity fingerprints beyond test/retest and assess fingerprint gradients in young adults by developing an extension of the differential identifiability framework. To do so, we look at the similarity between not only the multiple scans of an individual (subject fingerprin…
The frequency-specific coupling mechanism of the functional human brain networks underpins its complex cognitive and behavioral functions. Nevertheless, it is not well unveiled what are the frequency-specific subdivisions and network topologies of the human brain. In this study, we estimated functional connectivity of the human cerebral cortex using spectral connection, and conducted frequency-specific parcellation using eigen-clustering and gradient-based methods, and then explored their topological structures. 7T fMRI data of 184 subjects in the HCP dataset were used for parcellation and exp…
Connectivity information derived from diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance images~(DW-MRIs) plays an important role in studying human subcortical gray matter structures. However, due to the $O(N^2)$ complexity of computing the connectivity of each voxel to every other voxel (or multiple ROIs), the current practice of extracting connectivity information is highly inefficient. This makes the processing of high-resolution images and population-level analyses very computationally demanding. To address this issue, we propose a more efficient way to extract connectivity information; briefly, we con…
Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is an effective tool for the analysis of structural brain connectivity in normal development and in a broad range of brain disorders. However efforts to derive inherent characteristics of structural brain networks have been hampered by the very high dimensionality of the data, relatively small sample sizes, and the lack of widely acceptable connectivity-based regions of interests (ROIs). Typical approaches have focused either on regions defined by standard anatomical atlases that do not incorporate anatomical connectivity, or have been based on voxel-wise analysi…
The thalamus consists of several histologically and functionally distinct nuclei increasingly implicated in brain pathology and important for treatment, motivating the need for development of fast and accurate thalamic segmentation. The contrast between thalamic nuclei as well as between the thalamus and surrounding tissues is poor in T1 and T2 weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), inhibiting efforts to date to segment the thalamus using standard clinical MRI. Automatic segmentation techniques have been developed to leverage thalamic features better captured by advanced MRI methods, inclu…
Data-driven brain parcellations aim to provide a more accurate representation of an individual's functional connectivity, since they are able to capture individual variability that arises due to development or disease. This renders comparisons between the emerging brain connectivity networks more challenging, since correspondences between their elements are not preserved. Unveiling these correspondences is of major importance to keep track of local functional connectivity changes. We propose a novel method based on graph edit distance for the comparison of brain graphs directly in their domain…
Elucidating the intricate relationship between brain structure and function, both in healthy and pathological conditions, is a key challenge for modern neuroscience. Recent technical and methodological progress in neuroimaging has helped advance our understanding of this important issue, with diffusion weighted images providing information about structural connectivity (SC) and functional magnetic resonance imaging shedding light on resting state functional connectivity (rsFC). However, comparing these two distinct datasets, each of which can be encoded into a different complex network, is by …
Multimodal Recurrent Ensembles for Predicting Brain Responses to Naturalistic Movies (Algonauts 2025)
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences（马克斯·普朗克人类认知与脑科学研究所）；TU Dresden（德累斯顿技术大学）；School for Embedded and Composite AI (SECAI)（嵌入式与复合人工智能学院）；Center for Scalable Data Analytics & AI (ScaDS.AI)（可扩展数据与人工智能中心）
In this paper, the brain functional networks derived from high-resolution synchronous EEG time series during visual task are generated by calculating the phase synchronization among the time series. The hierarchical modular organizations of these networks are systematically investigated by the fast Girvan-Newman algorithm. At the same time, the spatially adjacent electrodes (corresponding to EEG channels) are clustered into functional groups based on anatomical parcellation of brain cortex, and this clustering information are compared to that of the functional network. The results show that th…
TReND: Transformer derived features and Regularized NMF for neonatal functional network Delineation
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia（费城儿童医院）；Peking University（北京大学）；Beijing Children’s Hospital（北京儿童医院）；Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）
Analysis and quantification of brain structural changes, using Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), are increasingly used to define novel biomarkers of brain pathologies, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). Network-based models of the brain have shown that both local and global topological properties can reveal patterns of disease propagation. On the other hand, intra-subject descriptions cannot exploit the whole information context, accessible through inter-subject comparisons. To address this, we developed a novel approach, which models brain structural connectivity atrophy with a multiplex netwo…
Objective: Longitudinal neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that adolescence is the crucial developmental epoch of continued brain growth and change. A large number of researchers dedicate to uncovering the mechanisms about brain maturity during adolescence. Motivated by both achievement in graph signal processing and recent evidence that some brain areas act as hubs connecting functionally specialized systems, we proposed an approach to detect these regions from spectral analysis perspective. In particular, as human brain undergoes substantial development throughout adolescence, we address…
Predicting Brain Responses To Natural Movies With Multimodal LLMs
Medical AI Research Center (MedARC)（医学人工智能研究中心（MedARC））；Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College（心理学与脑科学系，达特茅斯学院）；Core for Advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (CAMRI), Baylor College of Medicine（先进磁共振成像核心（CAMRI），贝勒医学院）；Sophont；Princeton Neuroscience Institute（普林斯顿神经科学研究所）
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Auburn University（电气与计算机工程系，阿伯杜大学）；Department of Computer Science, Emory University（计算机科学系，埃默里大学）；Department of Neurology, Emory University（神经病学系，埃默里大学）；Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory University（放射学与成像科学系，埃默里大学）
Directionality is a fundamental feature of network connections. Most structural brain networks are intrinsically directed because of the nature of chemical synapses, which comprise most neuronal connections. Due to limitations of non-invasive imaging techniques, the directionality of connections between structurally connected regions of the human brain cannot be confirmed. Hence, connections are represented as undirected, and it is still unknown how this lack of directionality affects brain network topology. Using six directed brain networks from different species and parcellations (cat, mouse…
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd.（上海联影智能医疗科技有限公司）
Functional connectivity network (FCN) data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is increasingly used for the diagnoses of brain disorders. However, state-of-the-art studies used to build the FCN using a single brain parcellation atlas at a certain spatial scale, which largely neglected functional interactions across different spatial scales in hierarchical manners. In this study, we propose a novel framework to perform multiscale FCN analysis for brain disorder diagnosis. We first use a set of well-defined multiscale atlases to compute multiscale FCNs. Then, we utilize biologicall…
JOSA: Joint surface-based registration and atlas construction of brain geometry and function
McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT（麦戈文脑科学研究所（麻省理工学院））；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT（计算机科学与人工智能实验室（麻省理工学院））
On the robustness of the emergent spatiotemporal dynamics in biophysically realistic and phenomenological whole-brain models at multiple network resolutions
Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；University Medicine, Greifswald（格赖夫斯瓦尔德大学医学中心）；German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases（德国神经退行性疾病中心）；Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience（伯恩斯坦计算神经科学中心）；Einstein Center for Neuroscience（爱因斯坦神经科学中心）
Deep Learning Inductive Biases for fMRI Time Series Classification during Resting-state and Movie-watching
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran（埃特瓦尔大学电气与计算机工程学院）；School of Cognitive Sciences, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM)（基础科学研究所（IPM）认知科学学院）
VarCoNet: A variability-aware self-supervised framework for functional connectome extraction from resting-state fMRI
Department of Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, and the Health Engineering Innovation Group (HEIG), Khalifa University（生物医学工程与生物技术系，以及健康工程创新小组（HEIG），卡利法大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（电气与计算机工程系，阿尔基洛斯大学）
