Brain networks can be defined and explored through their connectivity. Here, we analyzed the relationship between structural connectivity (SC) across 2,514 regions that cover the entire brain and brainstem, and their dynamic functional connectivity (DFC). To do so, we focused on a combination of two metrics: the first assesses the degree of SC-DFC similarity and the second is the intrinsic variability of the DFC networks over time. Overall, we found that cerebellar networks have a smaller DFC variability than other networks in the brain. Moreover, the internal structure of the cerebellum could be clearly divided in two distinct posterior and anterior parts, the latter also connected to the brainstem. The mechanism to maintain small variability of the DFC in the posterior part of the cerebellum is consistent with another of our findings, namely, that this structure exhibits the highest SC-DFC similarity relative to the other networks studied. By contrast, the anterior part of the cerebellum also exhibits small DFC variability but it has the lowest SC-DFC similarity, suggesting a different mechanism is at play. Because this structure connects to the brainstem, which regulates sleep cycles, cardiac and respiratory functioning, we suggest that such critical functionality drives the low variability in the DFC. Overall, the low variability detected in DFC expands our current knowledge of cerebellar networks, which are extremely rich and complex, participating in a wide range of cognitive functions, from movement control and coordination to executive function or emotional regulation. Moreover, the association between such low variability and structure suggests that differentiated computational principles can be applied in the cerebellum as opposed to other structures, such as the cerebral cortex.
Cross-Modality Translation with Generative Adversarial Networks to Unveil Alzheimer's Disease Biomarkers
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院电气与计算机工程学院）；Tri-institutional Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS), Georgia State University（佐治亚州立大学神经影像学与数据科学转化研究三机构中心（TReNDS））；College of Pharmacy, University of Florida（佛罗里达大学药学院）
The brain is a paradigmatic example of a complex system as its functionality emerges as a global property of local mesoscopic and microscopic interactions. Complex network theory allows to elicit the functional architecture of the brain in terms of links (correlations) between nodes (grey matter regions) and to extract information out of the noise. Here we present the analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data from forty healthy humans during the resting condition for the investigation of the basal scaffold of the functional brain network organization. We show how brain regions ten…
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) can alleviate the movement disorders like Parkinson's disease (PD). Indeed, it is known that aberrant beta (13-30Hz)oscillations and the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the basal ganglia-thalamus (BGTH) and cortex characterize the akinesia symptoms of PD. However, the relevant biophysical mechanism behind this process still remains unclear. Based on the prior striatal inhibitory model, we propose an extended BGTH model incorporating medium spine neurons (MSNs) and fast-spiking interneurons (FSIs) along with the effect of DBS. We are focusing in this paper on an ope…
Circadian rhythms synchronize a variety of physiological processes ranging from neural activity and hormone secretion to sleep cycles and feeding habits. Despite significant diurnal variation, time-of-day (TOD) is rarely recorded or analyzed in human brain research. Moreover, sleep-wake patterns, diurnal preferences, and daytime alertness vary across individuals, known as sleep chronotypes. Here, we performed graph-theory network analysis on resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) data to explore topological differences in whole-brain functional networks between morning and evening sessions (TO…
Individual differences in brain functional networks may be related to complex personal identifiers, including health, age, and ability. Understanding and quantifying these differences is a necessary first step towards developing predictive methods derived from network topology. Here, we present a method to quantify individual differences in brain functional dynamics by applying hypergraph analysis, a method from dynamic network theory. Using a summary metric derived from the hypergraph formalism---hypergraph cardinality---we investigate individual variations in two separate and complementary d…
Contemporary accounts of ongoing thought recognise it as a heterogeneous and multidimensional construct, varying in both form and content. An emerging body of evidence demonstrates that distinct types of experience are associated with unique neurocognitive profiles, that can be described at the whole-brain level as interactions between multiple large-scale networks. The current study sought to explore the possibility that whole-brain functional connectivity patterns at rest may be meaningfully related to patterns of ongoing thought that occurred over this period. Participants underwent resting…
The estimation of sparse hierarchical components reflecting patterns of the brain's functional connectivity from rsfMRI data can contribute to our understanding of the brain's functional organization, and can lead to biomarkers of diseases. However, inter-scanner variations and other confounding factors pose a challenge to the robust and reproducible estimation of functionally-interpretable brain networks, and especially to reproducible biomarkers. Moreover, the brain is believed to be organized hierarchically, and hence single-scale decompositions miss this hierarchy. The paper aims to use cu…
Neural network oscillations are a fundamental mechanism for cognition, perception and consciousness. Consequently, perturbations of network activity play an important role in the pathophysiology of brain disorders. When structural information from non-invasive brain imaging is merged with mathematical modeling, then generative brain network models constitute in-silico platforms for the exploration of causal mechanisms of brain function and clinical hypothesis testing. We here demonstrate along the example of drug-resistant epilepsy that patient-specific virtual brain models derived from diffus…
Global brain activity self-organizes into discrete patterns characterized by distinct behavioral observables and modes of information processing. The human thalamocortical system is a densely connected network where local neural activation reciprocally influences coordinated collective dynamics. We introduce a semi-empirical model to investigate the relationship between regional activation and long-range functional connectivity in the different brain states visited during the natural wake-sleep cycle. Our model combines functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, in vivo estimates of st…
Contemporary neuroimaging methods can shed light on the basis of human neural and cognitive specializations, with important implications for neuroscience and medicine. Different MRI acquisitions provide different brain networks at the macroscale; whilst diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI) provides a structural connectivity (SC) coincident with the bundles of parallel fibers between brain areas, functional MRI (fMRI) accounts for the variations in the blood-oxygenation-level-dependent T2* signal, providing functional connectivity (FC).Understanding the precise relation between FC and SC, that is, bet…
Understanding brain connectivity in a network-theoretic context has shown much promise in recent years. This type of analysis identifies brain organisational principles, bringing a new perspective to neuroscience. At the same time, large public databases of connectomic data are now available. However, connectome analysis is still an emerging field and there is a crucial need for robust computational methods to fully unravelits potential. This workshop provides a platform to discuss the development of new analytic techniques; methods for evaluating and validating commonly used approaches; as we…
We consider the problem of encoding pairwise correlations between coupled dynamical systems in a low-dimensional latent space based on few distinct observations. We used variational autoencoders (VAE) to embed temporal correlations between coupled nonlinear oscillators that model brain states in the wake-sleep cycle into a two-dimensional manifold. Training a VAE with samples generated using two different parameter combinations resulted in an embedding that represented the whole repertoire of collective dynamics, as well as the topology of the underlying connectivity network. We first followed…
Multi-modal neuroimaging projects are advancing our understanding of human brain architecture, function, connectivity using high-quality non-invasive data from many subjects. However, ground truth validation of connectivity using invasive tracers is not feasible in humans. Our NonHuman Primate Neuroimaging & Neuroanatomy Project (NHP_NNP) is an international effort (6 laboratories in 5 countries) to: (i) acquire and analyze high-quality multi-modal brain imaging data of macaque and marmoset monkeys using protocols and methods adapted from the HCP; (ii) acquire quantitative invasive tract-traci…
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is regarded as a brain disease with globally disrupted neuronal networks. Even though fMRI studies have revealed abnormal functional connectivity in ASD, they have not reached a consensus of the disrupted patterns. Here, a deep learning-based feature extraction method identifies multivariate and nonlinear functional connectivity patterns of ASD. Resting-state fMRI data of 972 subjects (465 ASD 507 normal controls) acquired from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange were used. A functional connectivity matrix of each subject was generated using 90 predefined brai…
The primary goal of this paper is to develop a method that quantifies how activity in one brain region can explain future activity in another region. Here, we propose the mixed effects spectral vector-autoregressive (ME-SpecVar) model to investigate differences in dynamics of dependence in a brain network between healthy children and those who are diagnosed with ADHD. Specifically, ME-SpecVar model will be used to formally test for significant connectivity structure obtained using filtered EEG signals in delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma frequency bands. The suggested model allows one-stage…
We consider the theoretical constraints on interactions between coupled cortical columns. Each column comprises a set of neural populations, where each population is modelled as a neural mass. The existence of semi-stable states within a cortical column has been shown to be dependent on the type of interaction between the constituent neuronal subpopulations, i.e., the form of the implicit synaptic convolution kernels. Current-to-current coupling has been shown, in contrast to potential-to-current coupling, to create semi-stable states within a cortical column. In this analytic and numerical st…
Edge time series are increasingly used in brain functional imaging to study the node functional connectivity (nFC) dynamics at the finest temporal resolution while avoiding sliding windows. Here, we lay the mathematical foundations for the edge-centric analysis of neuroimaging time series, explaining why a few high-amplitude cofluctuations drive the nFC across datasets. Our exposition also constitutes a critique of the existing edge-centric studies, showing that their main findings can be derived from the nFC under a static null hypothesis that disregards temporal correlations. Testing the ana…
One of the primary goals of systems neuroscience is to relate the structure of neural circuits to their function, yet patterns of connectivity are difficult to establish when recording from large populations in behaving organisms. Many previous approaches have attempted to estimate functional connectivity between neurons using statistical modeling of observational data, but these approaches rely heavily on parametric assumptions and are purely correlational. Recently, however, holographic photostimulation techniques have made it possible to precisely target selected ensembles of neurons, offer…
The contribution of structural connectivity to functional brain states remains poorly understood. We present a mathematical and computational study suited to assess the structure--function issue, treating a system of Jansen--Rit neural-mass nodes with heterogeneous structural connections estimated from diffusion MRI data provided by the Human Connectome Project. Via direct simulations we determine the similarity of functional (inferred from correlated activity between nodes) and structural connectivity matrices under variation of the parameters controlling single-node dynamics, highlighting a …
The relationship between brain structure and function has been probed using a variety of approaches, but how the underlying structural connectivity of the human brain drives behavior is far from understood. To investigate the effect of anatomical brain organization on human task performance, we use a data-driven computational modeling approach and explore the functional effects of naturally occurring structural differences in brain networks. We construct personalized brain network models by combining anatomical connectivity estimated from diffusion spectrum imaging of individual subjects with …
University of Illinois Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
Graph theoretical analyses have become standard tools in modeling functional and anatomical connectivity in the brain. With the advent of connectomics, the primary graphs or networks of interest are structural connectome (derived from DTI tractography) and functional connectome (derived from resting-state fMRI). However, most published connectome studies have focused on either structural or functional connectome, yet complementary information between them, when available in the same dataset, can be jointly leveraged to improve our understanding of the brain. To this end, we propose a function-…
Interaction patterns of brain activity across space, time and frequency. Part I: methods
我们认为探索性的方法发现皮层功能连接。通常，第i个受试者的数据（i=1. NS）表示为NVxNT矩阵Xi，对应于在NT时刻从NV皮质体素采样的脑活动。一种广泛使用的分析方法首先沿着时间维度连接所有受试者，然后执行独立成分分析（ICA）以估计功能连接的共同皮层模式。如[Calhoun et al. 2009 Neuroimage 45：S163-172]中所述，该技术存在许多其他有趣的变化。我们提出的方法发现功能连接发生在所有可能的时间滞后的更一般的问题。为此，大脑活动被视为空间和时间的函数，这允许使用功能数据分析的相对新的技术[Ramsay & Silverman 2005：Functional data analysis. New York：Springer.从本质上讲，我们的方法首先将每个主题的数据矢量化，这构成了多个变量函数的自然离散表示，然后将所有主题串联起来。奇异值分解（SVD），以及ICA的这个新的矩阵的维度[行=（NT*NV）;列=NS]将揭示时空模式的连接。作为另一示例，在EEG神经成像的情况下，大小为NVxNW的Xi可以表示来自第i个EEG时期的NV个皮层体素的NW个离散频率处的电神经元活动的谱密度。在这种情况下，我们的功能数据分析方法将揭示可能不同频率的大脑区域的耦合。
