Efficiency and cost of economical brain functional networks.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Achard S
PROVIDER: S-EPMC1794324 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Network analyses of structural connectivity in the brain have highlighted a set of highly connected hubs that are densely interconnected, forming a "rich-club" substrate in diverse species. Here, we demonstrate the existence of rich-club organization in functional brain networks of rats. Densely interconnected rich-club regions are found to be distributed in multiple brain modules, with the majority located within the putative default mode network. Rich-club members exhibit high wiring cost (as measured by connection distance) and high metabolic running cost (as surrogated by cerebral blood flow), which may have evolved to achieve high network communications to support efficient brain functions. Furthermore, by adopting a forepaw electrical stimulation paradigm, we find that the rich-club organization of the rat functional network remains almost the same as in the resting state, whereas path motif analysis reveals significant differences, suggesting the rat brain reorganizes its topological routes by increasing locally oriented shortcuts but reducing rich-club member-involved paths to conserve metabolic running cost during unimodal stimulation. Together, our results suggest that the neuronal system is organized and dynamically operated in an economic way to balance between cost minimization and topological/functional efficiency.
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Project description:The brain's functional connectivity is complex, has high energetic cost, and requires efficient use of glucose, the brain's main energy source. It has been proposed that regions with a high degree of functional connectivity are energy efficient and can minimize consumption of glucose. However, the relationship between functional connectivity and energy consumption in the brain is poorly understood. To address this neglect, here we propose a simple model for the energy demands of brain functional connectivity, which we tested with positron emission tomography and MRI in 54 healthy volunteers at rest. Higher glucose metabolism was associated with proportionally larger MRI signal amplitudes, and a higher degree of connectivity was associated with nonlinear increases in metabolism, supporting our hypothesis for the energy efficiency of the connectivity hubs. Basal metabolism (in the absence of connectivity) accounted for 30% of brain glucose utilization, which suggests that the spontaneous brain activity accounts for 70% of the energy consumed by the brain. The energy efficiency of the connectivity hubs was higher for ventral precuneus, cerebellum, and subcortical hubs than for cortical hubs. The higher energy demands of brain communication that hinges upon higher connectivity could render brain hubs more vulnerable to deficits in energy delivery or utilization and help explain their sensitivity to neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease.
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Project description:The human brain has been described as a complex network, which integrates information with high efficiency. However, the relationships between the efficiency of human brain functional networks and handedness and brain size remain unclear. Twenty-one left-handed and 32 right-handed healthy subjects underwent a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. The whole brain functional networks were constructed by thresholding Pearson correlation matrices of 90 cortical and subcortical regions. Graph theory-based methods were employed to further analyze their topological properties. As expected, all participants demonstrated small-world topology, suggesting a highly efficient topological structure. Furthermore, we found that smaller brains showed higher local efficiency, whereas larger brains showed higher global efficiency, reflecting a suitable efficiency balance between local specialization and global integration of brain functional activity. Compared with right-handers, significant alterations in nodal efficiency were revealed in left-handers, involving the anterior and median cingulate gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, angular gyrus, and amygdala. Our findings indicated that the functional network organization in the human brain was associated with handedness and brain size.
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Project description:Aging is associated with changes in human brain anatomy and function and cognitive decline. Recent studies suggest the aging decline of major functional connectivity hubs in the 'default-mode' network (DMN). Aging effects on other networks, however, are largely unknown. We hypothesized that aging would be associated with a decline of short- and long-range functional connectivity density (FCD) hubs in the DMN. To test this hypothesis, we evaluated resting-state data sets corresponding to 913 healthy subjects from a public magnetic resonance imaging database using functional connectivity density mapping (FCDM), a voxelwise and data-driven approach, together with parallel computing. Aging was associated with pronounced long-range FCD decreases in DMN and dorsal attention network (DAN) and with increases in somatosensory and subcortical networks. Aging effects in these networks were stronger for long-range than for short-range FCD and were also detected at the level of the main functional hubs. Females had higher short- and long-range FCD in DMN and lower FCD in the somatosensory network than males, but the gender by age interaction effects were not significant for any of the networks or hubs. These findings suggest that long-range connections may be more vulnerable to aging effects than short-range connections and that, in addition to the DMN, the DAN is also sensitive to aging effects, which could underlie the deterioration of attention processes that occurs with aging.
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Project description:Networks, as efficient representations of complex systems, have appealed to scientists for a long time and now permeate many areas of science, including neuroimaging (Bullmore and Sporns 2009 Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 10, 186-198. (doi:10.1038/nrn2618)). Traditionally, the structure of complex networks has been studied through their statistical properties and metrics concerned with node and link properties, e.g. degree-distribution, node centrality and modularity. Here, we study the characteristics of functional brain networks at the mesoscopic level from a novel perspective that highlights the role of inhomogeneities in the fabric of functional connections. This can be done by focusing on the features of a set of topological objects-homological cycles-associated with the weighted functional network. We leverage the detected topological information to define the homological scaffolds, a new set of objects designed to represent compactly the homological features of the correlation network and simultaneously make their homological properties amenable to networks theoretical methods. As a proof of principle,we apply these tools to compare resting state functional brain activity in 15 healthy volunteers after intravenous infusion of placebo and psilocybin-the main psychoactive component of magic mushrooms. The results show that the homological structure of the brain's functional patterns undergoes a dramatic change post-psilocybin, characterized by the appearance of many transient structures of low stability and of a small number of persistent ones that are not observed in the case of placebo.
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