Modular organization of brain resting state networks in chronic back pain patients

PABLO BALENZUELA; ARIEL CHERNOMORETZ; DANIEL FRAIMAN; IGNACIO CIFRE; CAROLINA SITGES; PEDRO MONTOYA; DANTE R CHIALVO

Frontiers in Neuroinformatics

Frontiers

Año: 2010 vol. 4 p. 1 - 16

1662-5196

Brain imaging results in chronic back pain patients suggested that the functional organization of brain network may be altered beyond the regions belonging to the pain matrix itself. In this work we use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to evaluate the integrity of brain resting state networks (RSN) of patients with chronic back pain (CBP) and healthy controls (HC). BOLD time series from 90 regions were selected using Tzourio-Mazoyer parcellation and their partial correlations used to define functional networks. Here we study the modular organization of these networks and found that they organize in up to six communities with similar modularity in both groups. However, there exist relevant differences in the communities membership of frontal and temporal regions. These finding were confirmed by a parsimonious analysis of the pairwise correlations between key 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.