Focal Brain Lesions to Critical Locations Cause Widespread Disruption of the Modular Organization of the Brain

By Caterina Gratton, Emi M. Nomura, Fernando Pérez, Mark D'Esposito. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2012

344 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although it is generally assumed that brain damage predominantly affects only the function of the damaged region, here we show that focal damage to critical locations causes disruption of network organization throughout the brain. Using resting state fMRI, we assessed whole-brain network structure in patients with focal brain lesions. Only damage to those brain regions important for communication between subnetworks (e.g., “connectors”)—but not to those brain regions important for communication within sub-networks (e.g., “hubs”)—led to decreases in modularity, a measure of the integrity of network organization. Critically, this network dysfunction extended into the structurally intact hemisphere. Thus, focal brain damage can have a widespread, nonlocal impact on brain network organization when there is damage to regions important for the communication between networks. These findings fundamentally revise our understanding of the remote effects of focal brain damage and may explain numerous puzzling cases of functional deficits that are observed following brain injury.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac98e77d33fb326316cb40fcb2b000a4d59acdea

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

The Human Thalamus Is an Integrative Hub for Functional Brain Networks (2016, methodology): “Previous studies suggest that connector hubs are critical for maintaining the modular architecture of functional brain networks (Gratton et al., 2012).”
Network attributes for segregation and integration in the human brain. (2013, background): “distributed effects on functional connectivity [56] and greater magnitude of effects following lesions of network hubs [57].”
An Introduction to Model-Based Cognitive Neuroscience (2015, methodology): “In contrast, Ashby [33] and Poldrack, Mumford, and Nichols [47] focus exclusively on experimental design and fMRI data analysis.”
Network hubs in the human brain. (2013, background): “Focal brain lesions located at cortical regions overlapping functional connector hubs, which play a central role in connecting different functional modules, have been reported to result in widespread disruption of the modular organization of the functional brain network [133].”
The modular and integrative functional architecture of the human brain (2015, background): “For example, in patients with focal brain lesions, damage to connector nodes, but not local nodes, decreases the modularity of the global network structure (88).”
The hubs of the human connectome are generally implicated in the anatomy of brain disorders (2014, background): “Furthermore, focal brain lesions affecting nodes involved in intermodular connections cause important reconfiguration of the whole network (Gratton et al., 2012).”
Functional brain networks are dominated by stable group and individual factors, not cognitive or daily variation (2018, background): “These approaches have been eagerly adopted by studies searching for insights into how brain networks reorganize with brain damage and disease (Baldassarre et al., 2016; Bassett and Bullmore, 2009; Gratton et al., 2012; Menon, 2011; Sheffield and Barch, 2016; Stam, 2014), differ across individuals (F”
Decreased segregation of brain systems across the healthy adult lifespan (2014, methodology): “007 Younger Adults (20-34) Middle Early Adults (35-49) Middle Late Adults (50-64) Older Adults (65-89) Older adults with better memory performance and higher association system segregation”
Diaschisis: past, present, future. (2014, background): “Indeed, network dysfunction extends into the structurally intact hemisphere (Gratton et al., 2012).”