Functional connectivity hubs in the human brain

By Dardo Tomasi, Nora D. Volkow. NeuroImage, 2011

360 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Brain networks appear to have few and well localized regions with high functional connectivity density (hubs) for fast integration of neural processing, and their dysfunction could contribute to neuropsychiatric diseases. However the variability in the distribution of these brain hubs is unknown due in part to the overwhelming computational demands associated to their localization. Recently we developed a fast algorithm to map the local functional connectivity density (lFCD). Here we extend our method to map the global density (gFDC) taking advantage of parallel computing. We mapped the gFCD in the brain of 1031 subjects from the 1000 Functional Connectomes project and show that the strongest hubs are located in regions of the default mode network (DMN) and in sensory cortices, whereas subcortical regions exhibited the weakest hubs. The strongest hubs were consistently located in ventral precuneus/cingulate gyrus (previously identified by other analytical methods including lFCD) and in primary visual cortex (BA 17/18), which highlights their centrality to resting connectivity networks. In contrast and after rescaling, hubs in prefrontal regions had lower gFCD than lFCD, which suggests that their local functional connectivity (as opposed to long-range connectivity) prevails in the resting state. The power scaling of the probability distribution of gFCD hubs (as for lFCD) was consistent across research centers further corroborating the “scale-free” topology of brain networks. Within and between-subject variability for gFCD were twice than that for lFCD (20% vs. 12% and 84% vs. 34%, respectively) suggesting that gFCD is more sensitive to individual differences in functional connectivity.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c75deae4f847990a0ed92db113928545bfbc39c9

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

Citations in the corpus

Gestures Enhance Foreign Language Learning (2012, background): “In fact, it is possible that motor information functions like a supramodal device with hub characteristics (Tomasi & Volkow 2011).”
Functional network organization of the human brain (2011, background): “Standard approaches to forming whole-brain rs-fcMRI graphs often ignore this issue and define nodes as voxels (Buckner et al., 2009; Cole et al., 2010; Fransson et al., 2011; Tomasi and Volkow, 2011; van den Heuvel et al., 2008), large parcels from anatomically based brain atlases (Hartman et al.”
Mapping the self in the brain's default mode network (2016, neutral): “…representations (Cavanna and Trimble, 2006); a function that the PCC, as one of the most anatomically and functionally connected regions of the brain – particularly with sensory association areas – is well placed to perform (Hagmann et al., 2008; Tomasi and Volkow, 2011; Leech and Sharp, 2014).”
Network attributes for segregation and integration in the human brain. (2013, methodology): “Various approaches have been used to define functional hubs [47], most prominently among them the local density of strong functional connections [48,49].”
20 years of the default mode network: a review and synthesis (2023, background): “37 Studies comparing self-referential and resting-state processes have identiﬁed overlapping activation in the mPFC, PCC, and left AG.”
Activity Dependent Degeneration Explains Hub Vulnerability in Alzheimer's Disease (2012, background): “A recently conducted large fMRI study demonstrated that highly connected cortical regions like the precuneus are even stronger hubs in females than in males: could this perhaps explain the higher levels of early amyloid deposition ánd the higher prevalence of AD in women [63,64]? The computational m”