scholarly journals Using structural connectivity to augment community structure in EEG functional connectivity

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 761-787 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Glomb ◽  
Emeline Mullier ◽  
Margherita Carboni ◽  
Maria Rubega ◽  
Giannarita Iannotti ◽  
...  

Recently, EEG recording techniques and source analysis have improved, making it feasible to tap into fast network dynamics. Yet, analyzing whole-cortex EEG signals in source space is not standard, partly because EEG suffers from volume conduction: Functional connectivity (FC) reflecting genuine functional relationships is impossible to disentangle from spurious FC introduced by volume conduction. Here, we investigate the relationship between white matter structural connectivity (SC) and large-scale network structure encoded in EEG-FC. We start by confirming that FC (power envelope correlations) is predicted by SC beyond the impact of Euclidean distance, in line with the assumption that SC mediates genuine FC. We then use information from white matter structural connectivity in order to smooth the EEG signal in the space spanned by graphs derived from SC. Thereby, FC between nearby, structurally connected brain regions increases while FC between nonconnected regions remains unchanged, resulting in an increase in genuine, SC-mediated FC. We analyze the induced changes in FC, assessing the resemblance between EEG-FC and volume-conduction- free fMRI-FC, and find that smoothing increases resemblance in terms of overall correlation and community structure. This result suggests that our method boosts genuine FC, an outcome that is of interest for many EEG network neuroscience questions.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Glomb ◽  
Emeline Mullier ◽  
Margherita Carboni ◽  
Maria Rubega ◽  
Giannarita Iannotti ◽  
...  

AbstractRecently, EEG recording techniques and source analysis have improved, making it feasible to tap into fast network dynamics. Yet, analyzing whole-cortex EEG signals in source space is not standard, partly because EEG suffers from volume conduction: Functional connectivity (FC) reflecting genuine functional relationships is impossible to disentangle from spurious FC introduced by volume conduction. Here, we investigate the relationship between white matter structural connectivity (SC) and large scale network structure encoded in EEG-FC. We start by confirming that FC (power envelope correlations) is predicted by SC beyond the impact of Euclidean distance, in line with the assumption that SC mediates genuine FC. We then use information from white matter structural connectivity (SC) in order to smooth the EEG signal in the space spanned by graphs derived from SC. Thereby, FC between nearby, structurally connected brain regions increases while FC between non-connected regions remains unchanged, resulting in an increase in genuine, SC-mediated FC. We analyze the induced changes in FC, assessing the resemblance between EEG- and volume-conduction-free fMRI-FC, and find that smoothing increases resemblance in terms of overall correlation and community structure. This result suggests that our method boosts genuine FC, an outcome that is of interest for many EEG network neuroscience questions.Author summaryIn this study, we combine high-density EEG recorded during resting state with white matter connectivity obtained from diffusion MRI and fiber tracking. We leverage the additional information contained in the structural connectome towards augmenting the source level EEG functional connectivity. In particular, it is known - and confirmed in this study - that the activity of brain regions that possess a direct anatomical connection is, on average, more strongly correlated than that of regions that have no such direct link. We use the structural connectome to define a graph and smooth the source reconstructed EEG signal in the space spanned by this graph. We compare the resulting “filtered” signal correlation matrices to those obtained from fMRI and find that such “graph filtering” improves the agreement between EEG and fMRI functional connectivity structure. This suggests that structural connectivity can be used to attenuate some of the limitations imposed by volume conduction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arian Ashourvan ◽  
Preya Shah ◽  
Adam Pines ◽  
Shi Gu ◽  
Christopher W. Lynn ◽  
...  

AbstractA major challenge in neuroscience is determining a quantitative relationship between the brain’s white matter structural connectivity and emergent activity. We seek to uncover the intrinsic relationship among brain regions fundamental to their functional activity by constructing a pairwise maximum entropy model (MEM) of the inter-ictal activation patterns of five patients with medically refractory epilepsy over an average of ~14 hours of band-passed intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings per patient. We find that the pairwise MEM accurately predicts iEEG electrodes’ activation patterns’ probability and their pairwise correlations. We demonstrate that the estimated pairwise MEM’s interaction weights predict structural connectivity and its strength over several frequencies significantly beyond what is expected based solely on sampled regions’ distance in most patients. Together, the pairwise MEM offers a framework for explaining iEEG functional connectivity and provides insight into how the brain’s structural connectome gives rise to large-scale activation patterns by promoting co-activation between connected structures.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajay Peddada ◽  
Kevin Holly ◽  
Tejaswi D Sudhakar ◽  
Christina Ledbetter ◽  
Christopher E. Talbot ◽  
...  

Background: Following mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) compromised white matter structural integrity can result in alterations in functional connectivity of large-scale brain networks and may manifest in functional deficit including cognitive dysfunction . Advanced magnetic resonance neuroimaging techniques, specifically diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), have demonstrated an increased sensitivity for detecting microstructural changes associated with mTBI. Identification of novel imaging biomarkers can facilitate early detection of these changes for effective treatment. In this study, we hypothesize that feature selection combining both structural and functional connectivity increases classification accuracy. Methods: 16 subjects with mTBI and 20 healthy controls underwent both DTI and resting state functional imaging. Structural connectivity matrices were generated from white matter tractography from DTI sequences. Functional connectivity was measured through pairwise correlations of rs-fMRI between brain regions. Features from both DTI and rs-fMRI were selected by identifying five brain regions with the largest group differences and were used to classify the generated functional and structural connectivity matrices, respectively. Classification was performed using linear support vector machines and validated with leave-one-out cross validation. Results: Group comparisons revealed increased functional connectivity in the temporal lobe and cerebellum as well as decreased structural connectivity in the temporal lobe. After training on structural connections only, a maximum classification accuracy of 78% was achieved when structural connections were selected based on their corresponding functional connectivity group differences. After training on functional connections only, a maximum classification accuracy of 69% was achieved when functional connections were selected based on their structural connectivity group differences. After training on both structural and functional connections, a maximum classification accuracy of 69% was achieved when connections were selected based on their structural connectivity. Conclusions: Our multimodal approach to ROI selection achieves at highest, a classification accuracy of 78%. Our results also implicate the temporal lobe in the pathophysiology of mTBI. Our findings suggest that white matter tractography can serve as a robust biomarker for mTBI when used in tandem with resting state functional connectivity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (6-7) ◽  
pp. 613-623 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shihui Xing ◽  
Ayan Mandal ◽  
Elizabeth H. Lacey ◽  
Laura M. Skipper-Kallal ◽  
Jinsheng Zeng ◽  
...  

Background. In functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, picture naming engages widely distributed brain regions in the parietal, frontal, and temporal cortices. However, it remains unknown whether those activated areas, along with white matter pathways between them, are actually crucial for naming. Objective. We aimed to identify nodes and pathways implicated in naming in healthy older adults and test the impact of lesions to the connectome on naming ability. Methods. We first identified 24 cortical nodes activated by a naming task and reconstructed anatomical connections between these nodes using probabilistic tractography in healthy adults. We then used structural scans and fractional anisotropy (FA) maps in 45 patients with left hemisphere stroke to assess the relationships of node and pathway integrity to naming, phonology, and nonverbal semantic ability. Results. We found that mean FA values in 13 left hemisphere white matter tracts within the dorsal and ventral streams and 1 interhemispheric tract significantly related to naming scores after controlling for lesion size and demographic factors. In contrast, lesion loads in the cortical nodes were not related to naming performance after controlling for the same variables. Among the identified tracts, the integrity of 4 left hemisphere ventral stream tracts related to nonverbal semantic processing and 1 left hemisphere dorsal stream tract related to phonological processing. Conclusions. Our findings reveal white matter structures vital for naming and its subprocesses. These findings demonstrate the value of multimodal methods that integrate functional imaging, structural connectivity, and lesion data to understand relationships between brain networks and behavior.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerio Zerbi ◽  
Amalia Floriou-Servou ◽  
Marija Markicevic ◽  
Yannick Vermeiren ◽  
Oliver Sturman ◽  
...  

AbstractThe locus coeruleus (LC) supplies norepinephrine (NE) to the entire forebrain, regulates many fundamental brain functions, and is implicated in several neuropsychiatric diseases. Although selective manipulation of the LC is not possible in humans, studies have suggested that strong LC activation might shift network connectivity to favor salience processing. To test this hypothesis, we use a mouse model to study the impact of LC stimulation on large-scale functional connectivity by combining chemogenetic activation of the LC with resting-state fMRI, an approach we term “chemo-connectomics”. LC activation rapidly interrupts ongoing behavior and strongly increases brain-wide connectivity, with the most profound effects in the salience and amygdala networks. We reveal a direct correlation between functional connectivity changes and transcript levels of alpha-1, alpha-2, and beta-1 adrenoceptors across the brain, and a positive correlation between NE turnover and functional connectivity within select brain regions. These results represent the first brain-wide functional connectivity mapping in response to LC activation, and demonstrate a causal link between receptor expression, brain states and functionally connected large-scale networks at rest. We propose that these changes in large-scale network connectivity are critical for optimizing neural processing in the context of increased vigilance and threat detection.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronaldo V. Nunes ◽  
Marcelo Bussotti Reyes ◽  
Jorge F. Mejias ◽  
Raphael Y. de Camargo

AbstractInferring the structural connectivity from electrophysiological measurements is a fundamental challenge in systems neuroscience. Directed functional connectivity measures, such as the Generalized Partial Directed Correlation (GPDC), provide estimates of the causal influence between areas. However, such methods have a limitation because their estimates depend on the number of brain regions simultaneously recorded. We analyzed this problem by evaluating the effectiveness of GPDC to estimate the connectivity of a ground-truth, data-constrained computational model of a large-scale mouse cortical network. The model contains 19 cortical areas modeled using spiking neural populations, and directed weights for long-range projections were obtained from a tract-tracing cortical connectome. We show that the GPDC estimates correlate positively with structural connectivity. Moreover, the correlation between structural and directed functional connectivity is comparable even when using only a few cortical areas for GPDC estimation, a typical scenario for electro-physiological recordings. Finally, GPDC measures also provided a measure of the flow of information among cortical areas.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shinho Cho ◽  
Jan T. Hachmann ◽  
Irena Balzekas ◽  
Myung-Ho In ◽  
Lindsey G. Andres-Beck ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTWhile it is known that the clinical efficacy of deep brain stimulation (DBS) alleviates motor-related symptoms, cognitive and behavioral effects of DBS and its action mechanism on brain circuits are not clearly understood. By combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and DBS, we investigated the pattern of blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signal changes induced by stimulating the nucleus accumbens and how inter-regional resting-state functional connectivity is related with the stimulation DBS effect in a healthy swine model. We found that the pattern of stimulation-induced BOLD activation was diffused across multiple functional networks including the prefrontal, limbic, and thalamic regions, altering inter-regional functional connectivity after stimulation. Furthermore, our results showed that the strength of the DBS effect is closely related to the strength of inter-regional resting-state functional connectivity including stimulation locus and remote brain regions. Our results reveal the impact of nucleus accumbens stimulation on major functional networks, highlighting functional connectivity may mediate the modulation effect of DBS via large-scale brain networks.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Parinaz Babaeeghazvini ◽  
Laura M. Rueda-Delgado ◽  
Jolien Gooijers ◽  
Stephan P. Swinnen ◽  
Andreas Daffertshofer

Implications of structural connections within and between brain regions for their functional counterpart are timely points of discussion. White matter microstructural organization and functional activity can be assessed in unison. At first glance, however, the corresponding findings appear variable, both in the healthy brain and in numerous neuro-pathologies. To identify consistent associations between structural and functional connectivity and possible impacts for the clinic, we reviewed the literature of combined recordings of electro-encephalography (EEG) and diffusion-based magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). It appears that the strength of event-related EEG activity increases with increased integrity of structural connectivity, while latency drops. This agrees with a simple mechanistic perspective: the nature of microstructural white matter influences the transfer of activity. The EEG, however, is often assessed for its spectral content. Spectral power shows associations with structural connectivity that can be negative or positive often dependent on the frequencies under study. Functional connectivity shows even more variations, which are difficult to rank. This might be caused by the diversity of paradigms being investigated, from sleep and resting state to cognitive and motor tasks, from healthy participants to patients. More challenging, though, is the potential dependency of findings on the kind of analysis applied. While this does not diminish the principal capacity of EEG and diffusion-based MRI co-registration, it highlights the urgency to standardize especially EEG analysis.


Author(s):  
Shawn D’Souza ◽  
Lisa Hirt ◽  
David R Ormond ◽  
John A Thompson

Abstract Gliomas are neoplasms that arise from glial cell origin and represent the largest fraction of primary malignant brain tumours (77%). These highly infiltrative malignant cell clusters modify brain structure and function through expansion, invasion and intratumoral modification. Depending on the growth rate of the tumour, location and degree of expansion, functional reorganization may not lead to overt changes in behaviour despite significant cerebral adaptation. Studies in simulated lesion models and in patients with stroke reveal both local and distal functional disturbances, using measures of anatomical brain networks. Investigations over the last two decades have sought to use diffusion tensor imaging tractography data in the context of intracranial tumours to improve surgical planning, intraoperative functional localization, and post-operative interpretation of functional change. In this study, we used diffusion tensor imaging tractography to assess the impact of tumour location on the white matter structural network. To better understand how various lobe localized gliomas impact the topology underlying efficiency of information transfer between brain regions, we identified the major alterations in brain network connectivity patterns between the ipsilesional versus contralesional hemispheres in patients with gliomas localized to the frontal, parietal or temporal lobe. Results were indicative of altered network efficiency and the role of specific brain regions unique to different lobe localized gliomas. This work draws attention to connections and brain regions which have shared structural susceptibility in frontal, parietal and temporal lobe glioma cases. This study also provides a preliminary anatomical basis for understanding which affected white matter pathways may contribute to preoperative patient symptomology.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Giacopelli ◽  
Domenico Tegolo ◽  
Emiliano Spera ◽  
Michele Migliore

AbstractThe brain’s structural connectivity plays a fundamental role in determining how neuron networks generate, process, and transfer information within and between brain regions. The underlying mechanisms are extremely difficult to study experimentally and, in many cases, large-scale model networks are of great help. However, the implementation of these models relies on experimental findings that are often sparse and limited. Their predicting power ultimately depends on how closely a model’s connectivity represents the real system. Here we argue that the data-driven probabilistic rules, widely used to build neuronal network models, may not be appropriate to represent the dynamics of the corresponding biological system. To solve this problem, we propose to use a new mathematical framework able to use sparse and limited experimental data to quantitatively reproduce the structural connectivity of biological brain networks at cellular level.


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