No Arabic abstract
The oxytocin effects on large-scale brain networks such as Default Mode Network (DMN) and Frontoparietal Network (FPN) have been largely studied using fMRI data. However, these studies are mainly based on the statistical correlation or Bayesian causality inference, lacking interpretability at physical and neuroscience level. Here, we propose a physics-based framework of Kuramoto model to investigate oxytocin effects on the phase dynamic neural coupling in DMN and FPN. Testing on fMRI data of 59 participants administrated with either oxytocin or placebo, we demonstrate that oxytocin changes the topology of brain communities in DMN and FPN, leading to higher synchronization in the FPN and lower synchronization in the DMN, as well as a higher variance of the coupling strength within the DMN and more flexible coupling patterns across time. These results together indicate that oxytocin may increase the ability to overcome the corresponding internal oscillation dispersion and support the flexibility in neural synchrony in various social contexts, providing new evidence for explaining the oxytocin modulated social behaviors. Our proposed Kuramoto model-based framework can be a potential tool in network neuroscience and offers physical and neural insights into phase dynamics of the brain.
Neurodegenerative diseases and traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are among the main causes of cognitive dysfunction in humans. Both manifestations exhibit the extensive presence of focal axonal swellings (FAS). FAS compromises the information encoded in spike trains, thus leading to potentially severe functional deficits. Complicating our understanding of the impact of FAS is our inability to access small scale injuries with non-invasive methods, the overall complexity of neuronal pathologies, and our limited knowledge of how networks process biological signals. Building on Hopfields pioneering work, we extend a model for associative memory to account for FAS and its impact on memory encoding. We calibrate all FAS parameters from biophysical observations of their statistical distribution and size, providing a framework to simulate the effects of brain disorders on memory recall performance. A face recognition example is used to demonstrate and validate the functionality of the novel model. Our results link memory recall ability to observed FAS statistics, allowing for a description of different stages of brain disorders within neuronal networks. This provides a first theoretical model to bridge experimental observations of FAS in neurodegeneration and TBI with compromised memory recall, thus closing the large gap between theory and experiment on how biological signals are processed in damaged, high-dimensional functional networks. The work further lends new insight into positing diagnostic tools to measure cognitive deficits.
The human brain forms functional networks on all spatial scales. Modern fMRI scanners allow to resolve functional brain data in high resolutions, allowing to study large-scale networks that relate to cognitive processes. The analysis of such networks forms a cornerstone of experimental neuroscience. Due to the immense size and complexity of the underlying data sets, efficient evaluation and visualization remain a challenge for data analysis. In this study, we combine recent advances in experimental neuroscience and applied mathematics to perform a mathematical characterization of complex networks constructed from fMRI data. We use task-related edge densities [Lohmann et al., 2016] for constructing networks of task-related changes in synchronization. This construction captures the dynamic formation of patterns of neuronal activity and therefore represents efficiently the connectivity structure between brain regions. Using geometric methods that utilize Forman-Ricci curvature as an edge-based network characteristic [Weber et al., 2017], we perform a mathematical analysis of the resulting complex networks. We motivate the use of edge-based characteristics to evaluate the network structure with geometric methods. The geometric features could aid in understanding the connectivity and interplay of brain regions in cognitive processes.
Recent developments in graph theoretic analysis of complex networks have led to deeper understanding of brain networks. Many complex networks show similar macroscopic behaviors despite differences in the microscopic details. Probably two most often observed characteristics of complex networks are scale-free and small-world properties. In this paper, we will explore whether brain networks follow scale-free and small-worldness among other graph theory properties.
Structural covariance analysis is a widely used structural MRI analysis method which characterises the co-relations of morphology between brain regions over a group of subjects. To our knowledge, little has been investigated in terms of the comparability of results between different data sets or the reliability of results over the same subjects in different rescan sessions, image resolutions, or FreeSurf
Entropy is a classical measure to quantify the amount of information or complexity of a system. Various entropy-based measures such as functional and spectral entropies have been proposed in brain network analysis. However, they are less widely used than traditional graph theoretic measures such as global and local efficiencies because either they are not well-defined on a graph or difficult to interpret its biological meaning. In this paper, we propose a new entropy-based graph invariant, called volume entropy. It measures the exponential growth rate of the number of paths in a graph, which is a relevant measure if information flows through the graph forever. We model the information propagation on a graph by the generalized Markov system associated to the weighted edge-transition matrix. We estimate the volume entropy using the stationary equation of the generalized Markov system. A prominent advantage of using the stationary equation is that it assigns certain distribution of weights on the edges of the brain graph, which we call the stationary distribution. The stationary distribution shows the information capacity of edges and the direction of information flow on a brain graph. The simulation results show that the volume entropy distinguishes the underlying graph topology and geometry better than the existing graph measures. In brain imaging data application, the volume entropy of brain graphs was significantly related to healthy normal aging from 20s to 60s. In addition, the stationary distribution of information propagation gives a new insight into the information flow of functional brain graph.