scholarly journals The intrinsic spatiotemporal organization of the human brain - A multi-dimensional functional network atlas

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jian Li ◽  
Yijun Liu ◽  
Jessica L. Wisnowski ◽  
Richard M. Leahy

The human brain is a complex, integrative and segregative network that exhibits dynamic fluctuations in activity across space and time. A canonical set of large-scale networks has been historically identified from resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI), including the default mode, visual, somatomotor, salience, attention, and executive control. However, the methods used in identification of these networks have relied on assumptions that may inadvertently constrain their properties and consequently our understanding of the human connectome. Here we define a brain "network" as a functional component that jointly describes its spatial distribution and temporal dynamics, where neither domain suffers from unrealistic constraints. Using our recently developed BrainSync algorithm and the Nadam-Accelerated SCAlable and Robust (NASCAR) tensor decomposition, we identified twenty-three brain networks using rs-fMRI data from a large group of healthy subjects acquired by the Human Connectome Project. These networks are spatially overlapped, temporally correlated, and highly reproducible across two independent groups and sessions. We show that these networks can be clustered into six distinct functional categories and naturally form a representative functional network atlas for a healthy population. Using this atlas, we demonstrate that individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder display disproportionate brain activity increases, relative to neurotypical subjects, in visual, auditory, and somatomotor networks concurrent with decreases in the default mode and higher-order cognitive networks. Thus, this work not only yields a highly reproducible set of spatiotemporally overlapped functional brain networks, but also provides convergent evidence that individual differences in these networks can be used to explain individual differences in neurocognitive functioning.

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (Supplement_6) ◽  
pp. vi224-vi224
Author(s):  
Alexis Morell ◽  
Daniel Eichberg ◽  
Ashish Shah ◽  
Evan Luther ◽  
Victor Lu ◽  
...  

Abstract BACKGROUND Developing mapping tools that allow identification of traditional or non-traditional eloquent areas is necessary to minimize the risk of postoperative neurologic deficits. The objective of our study is to evaluate the use of a novel cloud-based platform that uses machine learning to identify cerebral networks in patients with brain tumors. METHODS We retrospectively included all adult patients who underwent surgery for brain tumor resection or thermal ablation at our Institution between the 16th of February and the 15th of May of 2021. Pre and postoperative contrast-enhanced MRI with T1-weighted and high-resolution Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) sequences were uploaded into the Quicktome platform. After processing the data, we categorized the integrity of seven large-scale brain networks: sensorimotor, visual, ventral attention, central executive, default mode, dorsal attention and limbic. Affected networks were correlated with pre and postoperative clinical data, including neurologic deficits. RESULTS Thirty-five (35) patients were included in the study. The average age of the sample was 63.2 years, and 51.4% (n=18) were females. The most affected network was the central executive network (40%), followed by the dorsal attention and default mode networks (31.4%), while the least affected were the visual (11%) and ventral attention networks (17%). Patients with preoperative deficits showed a significantly higher number of altered networks before the surgery (p=0.021), compared to patients without deficits. In addition, we found that patients without neurologic deficits had an average of 2.06 large-scale networks affected, with 75% of them not being related to traditional eloquent areas as the sensorimotor, language or visual circuits. CONCLUSIONS The Quicktome platform is a practical tool that allows automatic visualization of large-scale brain networks in patients with brain tumors. Although further studies are needed, it may assist in the surgical management of traditional and non-traditional eloquent areas.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takamitsu Watanabe ◽  
Geraint Rees

Background: Despite accumulated evidence for adult brain plasticity, the temporal relationships between large-scale functional and structural connectivity changes in human brain networks remain unclear. Methods: By analysing a unique richly detailed 19-week longitudinal neuroimaging dataset, we tested whether macroscopic functional connectivity changes lead to the corresponding structural alterations in the adult human brain, and examined whether such time lags between functional and structural connectivity changes are affected by functional differences between different large-scale brain networks. Results: In this single-case study, we report that, compared to attention-related networks, functional connectivity changes in default-mode, fronto-parietal, and sensory-related networks occurred in advance of modulations of the corresponding structural connectivity with significantly longer time lags. In particular, the longest time lags were observed in sensory-related networks. In contrast, such significant temporal differences in connectivity change were not seen in comparisons between anatomically categorised different brain areas, such as frontal and occipital lobes. These observations survived even after multiple validation analyses using different connectivity definitions or using parts of the datasets. Conclusions: Although the current findings should be examined in independent datasets with different demographic background and by experimental manipulation, this single-case study indicates the possibility that plasticity of macroscopic brain networks could be affected by cognitive and perceptual functions implemented in the networks, and implies a hierarchy in the plasticity of functionally different brain systems.


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (9) ◽  
pp. 1209-1228 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rothlein ◽  
Joseph DeGutis ◽  
Michael Esterman

Attention is thought to facilitate both the representation of task-relevant features and the communication of these representations across large-scale brain networks. However, attention is not “all or none,” but rather it fluctuates between stable/accurate (in-the-zone) and variable/error-prone (out-of-the-zone) states. Here we ask how different attentional states relate to the neural processing and transmission of task-relevant information. Specifically, during in-the-zone periods: (1) Do neural representations of task stimuli have greater fidelity? (2) Is there increased communication of this stimulus information across large-scale brain networks? Finally, (3) can the influence of performance-contingent reward be differentiated from zone-based fluctuations? To address these questions, we used fMRI and representational similarity analysis during a visual sustained attention task (the gradCPT). Participants ( n = 16) viewed a series of city or mountain scenes, responding to cities (90% of trials) and withholding to mountains (10%). Representational similarity matrices, reflecting the similarity structure of the city exemplars ( n = 10), were computed from visual, attentional, and default mode networks. Representational fidelity (RF) and representational connectivity (RC) were quantified as the interparticipant reliability of representational similarity matrices within (RF) and across (RC) brain networks. We found that being in the zone was characterized by increased RF in visual networks and increasing RC between visual and attentional networks. Conversely, reward only increased the RC between the attentional and default mode networks. These results diverge with analogous analyses using functional connectivity, suggesting that RC and functional connectivity in tandem better characterize how different mental states modulate the flow of information throughout the brain.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurélie Bochet ◽  
Holger Franz Sperdin ◽  
Tonia Anahi Rihs ◽  
Nada Kojovic ◽  
Martina Franchini ◽  
...  

AbstractAutism spectrum disorders (ASD) are associated with disruption of large-scale brain network. Recently, we found that directed functional connectivity alterations of social brain networks are a core component of atypical brain development at early developmental stages in ASD. Here, we investigated the spatio-temporal dynamics of whole-brain neuronal networks at a subsecond scale in 113 toddlers and preschoolers (66 with ASD) using an EEG microstate approach. We first determined the predominant microstates using established clustering methods. We identified five predominant microstate (labeled as microstate classes A–E) with significant differences in the temporal dynamics of microstate class B between the groups in terms of increased appearance and prolonged duration. Using Markov chains, we found differences in the dynamic syntax between several maps in toddlers and preschoolers with ASD compared to their TD peers. Finally, exploratory analysis of brain–behavioral relationships within the ASD group suggested that the temporal dynamics of some maps were related to conditions comorbid to ASD during early developmental stages.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Youngheun Jo ◽  
Farnaz Zamani Esfahlani ◽  
Joshua Faskowitz ◽  
Evgeny J. Chumin ◽  
Olaf Sporns ◽  
...  

The human brain is composed of regions that can be grouped into functionally specialized systems. These systems transiently couple and decouple across time to support complex cognitive processes. Recently, we proposed an edge-centric model of brain networks whose elements can be clustered to reveal communities of connections whose co-fluctuations are correlated across time. It remains unclear, however, how these co-fluctuation patterns relate to traditionally-defined brain systems. Here, we address this question using data from the Midnight Scan Club. We show that edge communities transcend traditional definitions of brain systems, forming a multiplexed network in which all pairs of brain systems are linked to one another by at least two distinct edge communities. Mapping edge communities back to individual brain regions and deriving a novel distance metric to describe the similarity of regions’ “edge community profiles”, we then demonstrate that the within-system similarity of profiles is heterogeneous across systems. Specifically, we find that heteromodal association areas exhibit significantly greater diversity of edge communities than primary sensory systems. Next, we cluster the entire cerebral cortex according to the similarity of regions’ edge community profiles, revealing systematic differences between traditionally-defined systems and the detected clusters. Specifically, we find that regions in heteromodal systems exhibit dissimilar edge community profiles and are more likely to form their own clusters. Finally, we show show that edge communities are highly personalized and can be used to identify individual subjects. Collectively, our work reveals the pervasive overlap of edge communities across the cerebral cortex and characterizes their relationship with the brain’s system level architecture. Our work provides clear pathways for future research using edge-centric brain networks to investigate individual differences in behavior, development, and disease.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia M. Li ◽  
Ines R. Violante ◽  
Rob Leech ◽  
Ewan Ross ◽  
Adam Hampshire ◽  
...  

AbstractTranscranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) has been widely used to improve cognitive function. However, current deficiencies in mechanistic understanding hinders wider applicability. To clarify its physiological effects, we acquired fMRI whilst simultaneously acquiring TDCS to the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) of healthy human participants, a region involved in coordinating activity within brain networks. TDCS caused widespread modulation of network activity depending on brain state (‘rest’ or choice reaction time task) and polarity (anodal or cathodal). During task, TDCS increased salience network activation and default mode network deactivation, but had the opposite effect during ‘rest’. Furthermore, there was an interaction between brain state and TDCS polarity, with cathodal effects more pronounced during task performance and anodal effects more pronounced during ‘rest’. Overall, we show that rIFG TDCS produces brain state and polarity dependent effects within large-scale cognitive networks, in a manner that goes beyond predictions from the current literature.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 455-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrico Amico ◽  
Alex Arenas ◽  
Joaquín Goñi

A key question in modern neuroscience is how cognitive changes in a human brain can be quantified and captured by functional connectivity (FC). A systematic approach to measure pairwise functional distance at different brain states is lacking. This would provide a straightforward way to quantify differences in cognitive processing across tasks; also, it would help in relating these differences in task-based FCs to the underlying structural network. Here we propose a framework, based on the concept of Jensen-Shannon divergence, to map the task-rest connectivity distance between tasks and resting-state FC. We show how this information theoretical measure allows for quantifying connectivity changes in distributed and centralized processing in functional networks. We study resting state and seven tasks from the Human Connectome Project dataset to obtain the most distant links across tasks. We investigate how these changes are associated with different functional brain networks, and use the proposed measure to infer changes in the information-processing regimes. Furthermore, we show how the FC distance from resting state is shaped by structural connectivity, and to what extent this relationship depends on the task. This framework provides a well-grounded mathematical quantification of connectivity changes associated with cognitive processing in large-scale brain networks.


2014 ◽  
Vol 369 (1653) ◽  
pp. 20130531 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petra E. Vértes ◽  
Aaron Alexander-Bloch ◽  
Edward T. Bullmore

Rich clubs arise when nodes that are ‘rich’ in connections also form an elite, densely connected ‘club’. In brain networks, rich clubs incur high physical connection costs but also appear to be especially valuable to brain function. However, little is known about the selection pressures that drive their formation. Here, we take two complementary approaches to this question: firstly we show, using generative modelling, that the emergence of rich clubs in large-scale human brain networks can be driven by an economic trade-off between connection costs and a second, competing topological term. Secondly we show, using simulated neural networks, that Hebbian learning rules also drive the emergence of rich clubs at the microscopic level, and that the prominence of these features increases with learning time. These results suggest that Hebbian learning may provide a neuronal mechanism for the selection of complex features such as rich clubs. The neural networks that we investigate are explicitly Hebbian, and we argue that the topological term in our model of large-scale brain connectivity may represent an analogous connection rule. This putative link between learning and rich clubs is also consistent with predictions that integrative aspects of brain network organization are especially important for adaptive behaviour.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurélie Bochet ◽  
Holger Franz Sperdin ◽  
Tonia Anahi Rihs ◽  
Nada Kojovic ◽  
Martina Franchini ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTDisruption of large-scale brain networks is associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Recently, we found that directed functional connectivity alterations of social brain networks are a core component of atypical brain development at early developmental stages in ASD (Sperdin et al., 2018). Here, we investigated the spatio-temporal dynamics of whole-brain neuronal networks at a subsecond scale in 90 toddlers and preschoolers (47 with ASD) using an EEG microstate approach. Results revealed the presence of five microstate classes that best described the entire dataset (labeled as microstate classes A-E). Microstate class C related to the Default Mode Network (DMN) occurred less in children with ASD. Analysis of brain-behavioural relationships within the ASD group suggested that a compensatory mechanism from microstate C was associated with less severe symptoms and better adaptive skills. These results demonstrate that the temporal properties of some specific EEG microstates are altered in ASD at early developmental stages.


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