This title appears in the Scientific Report :
2021
Gender Differences in Empirical and Simulated Brain Connectomes
Gender Differences in Empirical and Simulated Brain Connectomes
Investigating gender differences in brain connectomes has been an active area of research in neuroscience. Previous studies have, however, explored only the empirical connectomes. This projectconsiders simulated brain connectomes generated by whole-brain dynamical models and their correlation with t...
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Personal Name(s): | Patil, Kaustubh |
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Popovych, Oleksandr / Jain, Shraddha (Corresponding author) | |
Contributing Institute: |
Gehirn & Verhalten; INM-7 |
Imprint: |
2021
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Conference: | INM & IBI Retreat 2021, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Virtual Conference (Germany), 2021-10-05 - 2021-10-06 |
Document Type: |
Poster |
Research Program: |
Human Brain Project Specific Grant Agreement 3 Human Brain Project Specific Grant Agreement 2 Neuroscientific Data Analytics and AI Neuroscientific Foundations Computational Principles Personalized Recommendations for Neurodegenerative Disease |
Subject (ZB): | |
Publikationsportal JuSER |
Investigating gender differences in brain connectomes has been an active area of research in neuroscience. Previous studies have, however, explored only the empirical connectomes. This projectconsiders simulated brain connectomes generated by whole-brain dynamical models and their correlation with the empirical connectomes to investigate gender differences. The analysis involves 272subjects from the human connectome project (144 females). For each individual and 11 brain parcellation schemes, we calculated an empirical structural connectivity (eSC), an empirical functionalconnectivity (eFC) of the resting-state fMRI BOLD signals and two simulated functional connectivity(sFC) matrices based on the ensembles of coupled phase- (PO) and limit-cycle (LC) oscillators. Thegender difference was then investigated using the Wilcoxon sum ranks test of the Pearson’s correlation coefficient corr(sFC, eFC) between the simulated and the empirical functional connectomes. Weobserved a significantly higher correlation for males for 11 parcellations. Since the models utilizethe empirical information, we regressed out the brain size and empirical structure-function relationship corr(eFC, eSC), to check if the gender difference still persists. After the regression, thisdifference remains significant for 10 atlases for PO model and for 8 atlases for LC model. Interestingly, the gender difference in corr(eFC, eSC) showed an opposite trend - the females showed a betterstructure-function correspondence than males. This is in contrast with the modeling results, wherea better fit between sFC and eFC is observed for males. A potential reason for this discrepancy couldbe the difference in complexity of the empirical data between genders, which in turn may influencethe quality of the model fitting. The project currently aims to examine this in more detail. |