Modular Organization in functional brain resting state networks

BALENZUELA, PABLO

Montevideo

Workshop; Fourth LINC Workshop - Learning about Networks in Climate; 2014

Facultdad de Ciencias, Universidad de la República, Uruguay

Recent work on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)  large scale brain networks under resting conditions demonstrated its potential to evaluate the integrity of brain function under normal  and pathological conditions. A similar approach is used in this work to study a group of chronic back pain patients (CBP) and healthy controls (HC)  to determine the impact of long enduring pain over brain dynamics. Correlation networks were constructed from the mutual partial correlations of brain activity's time series  selected from ninety regions using a well validated brain parcelation atlas. The study of the resulting networks revealed an organization of up to six communities with similar modularity in both groups, but with important differences in the membership of key communities of frontal and temporal regions. The bulk of these findings were confirmed by a surprisingly naive analysis based on the pairwise correlations of the strongest and weakest correlated healthy regions. Beside confirming the brain effects of long enduring pain, these results provide a framework to study the effect of other chronic conditions over cortical function.