Explicitly Linking Regional Activation and Function Connectivity: Community Structure of Weighted Networks with Continuous Annotation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a probabilistic model for community detection in weighted networks with continuous annotations, linking neurophysiological activation and connectivity to better understand brain function during learning.

Contribution

It develops a novel generative model that simultaneously considers node activation and connectivity patterns, addressing a gap in network neuroscience analysis tools.

Findings

Faster learners show greater dissimilarity between connectivity and activation.

The model reveals distinct neurophysiological dimensions related to behavior.

Application to neuroimaging data demonstrates the model's utility in brain studies.

Abstract

A major challenge in neuroimaging is understanding the mapping of neurophysiological dynamics onto cognitive functions. Traditionally, these maps have been constructed by examining changes in the activity magnitude of regions related to task performance. Recently, network neuroscience has produced methods to map connectivity patterns among many regions to certain cognitive functions by drawing on tools from network science and graph theory. However, these two different views are rarely addressed simultaneously, largely because few tools exist that account for patterns between nodes while simultaneously considering activation of nodes. We address this gap by solving the problem of community detection on weighted networks with continuous (non-integer) annotations by deriving a generative probabilistic model. This model generates communities whose members connect densely to nodes within their own community, and whose members share similar annotation values. We demonstrate the utility of the model in the context of neuroimaging data gathered during a motor learning paradigm, where edges are task-based functional connectivity and annotations to each node are beta weights from a general linear model that encoded a linear decrease in blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal with practice. Interestingly, we observe that individuals who learn at a faster rate exhibit the greatest dissimilarity between functional connectivity and activation magnitudes, suggesting that activation and functional connectivity are distinct dimensions of neurophysiology that track behavioral change. More generally, the tool that we develop offers an explicit, mathematically principled link between functional activation and functional connectivity, and can readily be applied to a other similar problems in which one set of imaging data offers network data, and a second offers a regional attribute.