scholarly journals A set of functionally-defined brain regions with improved representation of the subcortex and cerebellum

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Seitzman ◽  
Caterina Gratton ◽  
Scott Marek ◽  
Ryan V. Raut ◽  
Nico U.F. Dosenbach ◽  
...  

AbstractAn important aspect of network-based analysis is robust node definition. This issue is critical for functional brain network analyses, as poor node choice can lead to spurious findings and misleading inferences about functional brain organization. Two sets of functional brain nodes from our group are well represented in the literature: (1) 264 volumetric regions of interest (ROIs) reported in Power et al., 2011 and (2) 333 cortical surface parcels reported in Gordon et al., 2016. However, subcortical and cerebellar structures are either incompletely captured or missing from these ROI sets. Therefore, properties of functional network organization involving the subcortex and cerebellum may be underappreciated thus far. Here, we apply a winner-take-all partitioning method to resting-state fMRI data to generate novel functionally-constrained ROIs in the thalamus, basal ganglia, amygdala, hippocampus, and cerebellum. We validate these ROIs in three datasets using several criteria, including agreement with existing literature and anatomical atlases. Further, we demonstrate that combining these ROIs with established cortical ROIs recapitulates and extends previously described functional network organization. This new set of ROIs is made publicly available for general use, including a full list of MNI coordinates and functional network labels.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjolein Spronk ◽  
Kaustubh Kulkarni ◽  
Jie Lisa Ji ◽  
Brian P. Keane ◽  
Alan Anticevic ◽  
...  

AbstractA wide variety of mental disorders have been associated with resting-state functional network alterations, which are thought to contribute to the cognitive changes underlying mental illness. These observations have seemed to support various theories postulating large-scale disruptions of brain systems in mental illness. However, existing approaches isolate differences in network organization without putting those differences in broad, whole-brain perspective. Using a graph distance measure – connectome-wide correlation – we found that whole-brain resting-state functional network organization in humans is highly similar across a variety of mental diseases and healthy controls. This similarity was observed across autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and schizophrenia. Nonetheless, subtle differences in network graph distance were predictive of diagnosis, suggesting that while functional connectomes differ little across health and disease those differences are informative. Such small network alterations may reflect the fact that most psychiatric patients maintain overall cognitive abilities similar to those of healthy individuals (relative to, e.g., the most severe schizophrenia cases), such that whole-brain functional network organization is expected to differ only subtly even for mental diseases with devastating effects on everyday life. These results suggest a need to reevaluate neurocognitive theories of mental illness, with a role for subtle functional brain network changes in the production of an array of mental diseases.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Wang ◽  
Yanshuang Ren ◽  
Wensheng Zhang

Study of functional brain network (FBN) based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has proved successful in depression disorder classification. One popular approach to construct FBN is Pearson correlation. However, it only captures pairwise relationship between brain regions, while it ignores the influence of other brain regions. Another common issue existing in many depression disorder classification methods is applying only single local feature extracted from constructed FBN. To address these issues, we develop a new method to classify fMRI data of patients with depression and healthy controls. First, we construct the FBN using a sparse low-rank model, which considers the relationship between two brain regions given all the other brain regions. Moreover, it can automatically remove weak relationship and retain the modular structure of FBN. Secondly, FBN are effectively measured by eight graph-based features from different aspects. Tested on fMRI data of 31 patients with depression and 29 healthy controls, our method achieves 95% accuracy, 96.77% sensitivity, and 93.10% specificity, which outperforms the Pearson correlation FBN and sparse FBN. In addition, the combination of graph-based features in our method further improves classification performance. Moreover, we explore the discriminative brain regions that contribute to depression disorder classification, which can help understand the pathogenesis of depression disorder.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas C. Breedt ◽  
Fernando A.N. Santos ◽  
Arjan Hillebrand ◽  
Liesbeth Reneman ◽  
Anne-Fleur van Rootselaar ◽  
...  

Executive functioning is a higher-order cognitive process that is thought to depend on a brain network organization facilitating network integration across specialized subnetworks. The frontoparietal network (FPN), a subnetwork that has diverse connections to other brain modules, seems pivotal to this integration, and a more central role of regions in the FPN has been related to better executive functioning. Brain networks can be constructed using different modalities: diffusion MRI (dMRI) can be used to reconstruct structural networks, while resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) yield functional networks. These networks are often studied in a unimodal way, which cannot capture potential complementary or synergistic modal information. The multilayer framework is a relatively new approach that allows for the integration of different modalities into one 'network of networks'. It has already yielded promising results in the field of neuroscience, having been related to e.g. cognitive dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease. Multilayer analyses thus have the potential to help us better understand the relation between brain network organization and executive functioning. Here, we hypothesized a positive association between centrality of the FPN and executive functioning, and we expected that multimodal multilayer centrality would supersede unilayer centrality in explaining executive functioning. We used dMRI, rsfMRI, MEG, and neuropsychological data obtained from 33 healthy adults (age range 22-70 years) to construct eight modality-specific unilayer networks (dMRI, fMRI, and six MEG frequency bands), as well as a multilayer network comprising all unilayer networks. Interlayer links in the multilayer network were present only between a node's counterpart across layers. We then computed and averaged eigenvector centrality of the nodes within the FPN for every uni- and multilayer network and used multiple regression models to examine the relation between uni- or multilayer centrality and executive functioning. We found that higher multilayer FPN centrality, but not unilayer FPN centrality, was related to better executive functioning. To further validate multilayer FPN centrality as a relevant measure, we assessed its relation with age. Network organization has been shown to change across the life span, becoming increasingly efficient up to middle age and regressing to a more segregated topology at higher age. Indeed, the relation between age and multilayer centrality followed an inverted-U shape. These results show the importance of FPN integration for executive functioning as well as the value of a multilayer framework in network analyses of the brain. Multilayer network analysis may particularly advance our understanding of the interplay between different brain network aspects in clinical populations, where network alterations differ across modalities.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 824-835 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Weis ◽  
Kaustubh R Patil ◽  
Felix Hoffstaedter ◽  
Alessandra Nostro ◽  
B T Thomas Yeo ◽  
...  

Abstract A large amount of brain imaging research has focused on group studies delineating differences between males and females with respect to both cognitive performance as well as structural and functional brain organization. To supplement existing findings, the present study employed a machine learning approach to assess how accurately participants’ sex can be classified based on spatially specific resting state (RS) brain connectivity, using 2 samples from the Human Connectome Project (n1 = 434, n2 = 310) and 1 fully independent sample from the 1000BRAINS study (n = 941). The classifier, which was trained on 1 sample and tested on the other 2, was able to reliably classify sex, both within sample and across independent samples, differing both with respect to imaging parameters and sample characteristics. Brain regions displaying highest sex classification accuracies were mainly located along the cingulate cortex, medial and lateral frontal cortex, temporoparietal regions, insula, and precuneus. These areas were stable across samples and match well with previously described sex differences in functional brain organization. While our data show a clear link between sex and regionally specific brain connectivity, they do not support a clear-cut dimorphism in functional brain organization that is driven by sex alone.


2013 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. P670-P670 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanneke de Waal ◽  
Cornelis Stam ◽  
Marieke Lansbergen ◽  
F. Maestú ◽  
Philip Scheltens ◽  
...  

eLife ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Hahn ◽  
Michael Breakspear ◽  
Lucas Rischka ◽  
Wolfgang Wadsak ◽  
Godber M Godbersen ◽  
...  

The ability to solve cognitive tasks depends upon adaptive changes in the organization of whole-brain functional networks. However, the link between task-induced network reconfigurations and their underlying energy demands is poorly understood. We address this by multimodal network analyses integrating functional and molecular neuroimaging acquired concurrently during a complex cognitive task. Task engagement elicited a marked increase in the association between glucose consumption and functional brain network reorganization. This convergence between metabolic and neural processes was specific to feedforward connections linking the visual and dorsal attention networks, in accordance with task requirements of visuo-spatial reasoning. Further increases in cognitive load above initial task engagement did not affect the relationship between metabolism and network reorganization but only modulated existing interactions. Our findings show how the upregulation of key computational mechanisms to support cognitive performance unveils the complex, interdependent changes in neural metabolism and neuro-vascular responses.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor S Bolt ◽  
Jason Nomi ◽  
Danilo Bzdok ◽  
Catie Chang ◽  
B.T. Thomas Yeo ◽  
...  

The characterization of intrinsic functional brain organization has been approached from a multitude of analytic techniques and methods. We are still at a loss of a unifying conceptual framework for capturing common insights across this patchwork of empirical findings. By analyzing resting-state fMRI data from the Human Connectome Project using a large number of popular analytic techniques, we find that all results can be seamlessly reconciled by three fundamental low-frequency spatiotemporal patterns that we have identified via a novel time-varying complex pattern analysis. Overall, these three spatiotemporal patterns account for a wide variety of previously observed phenomena in the resting-state fMRI literature including the task-positive/task-negative anticorrelation, the global signal, the primary functional connectivity gradient and the network community structure of the functional connectome. The shared spatial and temporal properties of these three canonical patterns suggest that they arise from a single hemodynamic mechanism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 547-561
Author(s):  
Marjolein Spronk ◽  
Brian P Keane ◽  
Takuya Ito ◽  
Kaustubh Kulkarni ◽  
Jie Lisa Ji ◽  
...  

Abstract A wide variety of mental disorders have been associated with resting-state functional network alterations, which are thought to contribute to the cognitive changes underlying mental illness. These observations appear to support theories postulating large-scale disruptions of brain systems in mental illness. However, existing approaches isolate differences in network organization without putting those differences in a broad, whole-brain perspective. Using a graph distance approach—connectome-wide similarity—we found that whole-brain resting-state functional network organization is highly similar across groups of individuals with and without a variety of mental diseases. This similarity was observed across autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and schizophrenia. Nonetheless, subtle differences in network graph distance were predictive of diagnosis, suggesting that while functional connectomes differ little across health and disease, those differences are informative. These results suggest a need to reevaluate neurocognitive theories of mental illness, with a role for subtle functional brain network changes in the production of an array of mental diseases. Such small network alterations suggest the possibility that small, well-targeted alterations to brain network organization may provide meaningful improvements for a variety of mental disorders.


NeuroImage ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 199 ◽  
pp. 87-92
Author(s):  
Lin Shi ◽  
Wutao Lou ◽  
Adrian Wong ◽  
Fan Zhang ◽  
Jill Abrigo ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 777
Author(s):  
Nicholas John Simos ◽  
Stavros I. Dimitriadis ◽  
Eleftherios Kavroulakis ◽  
Georgios C. Manikis ◽  
George Bertsias ◽  
...  

Neuropsychiatric systemic lupus erythematosus (NPSLE) is an autoimmune entity comprised of heterogenous syndromes affecting both the peripheral and central nervous system. Research on the pathophysiological substrate of NPSLE manifestations, including functional neuroimaging studies, is extremely limited. The present study examined person-specific patterns of whole-brain functional connectivity in NPSLE patients (n = 44) and age-matched healthy control participants (n = 39). Static functional connectivity graphs were calculated comprised of connection strengths between 90 brain regions. These connections were subsequently filtered through rigorous surrogate analysis, a technique borrowed from physics, novel to neuroimaging. Next, global as well as nodal network metrics were estimated for each individual functional brain network and were input to a robust machine learning algorithm consisting of a random forest feature selection and nested cross-validation strategy. The proposed pipeline is data-driven in its entirety, and several tests were performed in order to ensure model robustness. The best-fitting model utilizing nodal graph metrics for 11 brain regions was associated with 73.5% accuracy (74.5% sensitivity and 73% specificity) in discriminating NPSLE from healthy individuals with adequate statistical power. Closer inspection of graph metric values suggested an increased role within the functional brain network in NSPLE (indicated by higher nodal degree, local efficiency, betweenness centrality, or eigenvalue efficiency) as compared to healthy controls for seven brain regions and a reduced role for four areas. These findings corroborate earlier work regarding hemodynamic disturbances in these brain regions in NPSLE. The validity of the results is further supported by significant associations of certain selected graph metrics with accumulated organ damage incurred by lupus, with visuomotor performance and mental flexibility scores obtained independently from NPSLE patients.


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