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

P. BALENZUELA; A. CHERNOMORETZ; D. FRAIMAN; I. CIFRE; C. STIGES; D. CHIALVO

Frontiers in Neuroinformatics

Frontiers

Lugar: Laussane; Año: 2010 p. 11601 - 11616

1662-5196

Recent work on functional magnetic resonance imaging large-scale brain networks under restingconditions demonstrated its potential to evaluate the integrity of brain function under normaland pathological conditions. A similar approach is used in this work to study a group of chronicback pain patients and healthy controls to determine the impact of long enduring pain overbrain dynamics. Correlation networks were constructed from the mutual partial correlations ofbrain activity’s time series selected from ninety regions using a well validated brain parcellationatlas. The study of the resulting networks revealed an organization of up to six communitieswith similar modularity in both groups, but with important differences in the membership ofkey communities of frontal and temporal regions. The bulk of these findings were confirmed bya surprisingly naive analysis based on the pairwise correlations of the strongest and weakestcorrelated healthy regions. Beside confirming the brain effects of long enduring pain, these resultsprovide a framework to study the effect of other chronic conditions over cortical function.