Comparing Advanced Graph-Theoretical Parameters of the Connectomes of the Lobes of the Human Brain

TL;DR

This study applies classical graph-theoretical parameters to human brain connectomes, revealing significant differences in connectivity properties between brain lobes and hemispheres, advancing understanding of brain network architecture.

Contribution

It introduces the use of deep classical graph parameters on brain connectomes, comparing lobes and hemispheres with a large dataset, revealing novel connectivity differences.

Findings

Right parietal lobe has more edges and higher density than the left.

Left frontal lobe shows higher connectivity metrics than the right.

Right temporal lobe exhibits greater graph connectivity than the left.

Abstract

Deep, classical graph-theoretical parameters, like the size of the minimum vertex cover, the chromatic number, or the eigengap of the adjacency matrix of the graph were studied widely by mathematicians in the last century. Most researchers today study much simpler parameters of braingraphs or connectomes which were defined in the last twenty years for enormous networks -- like the graph of the World Wide Web -- with hundreds of millions of nodes. Since the connectomes, describing the connections of the human brain, typically contain several hundred vertices today, one can compute and analyze the much deeper, harder-to-compute classical graph parameters for these, relatively small graphs of the brain. This deeper approach has proven to be very successful in the comparison of the connectomes of the sexes in our earlier works: we have shown that graph parameters, deeply characterizing the graph connectivity are significantly better in women's connectomes than in men's. In the present contribution we compare numerous graph parameters in the three largest lobes --- frontal, parietal, temporal --- and in both hemispheres of the brain. We apply the diffusion weighted imaging data of 423 subjects of the NIH-funded Human Connectome Project, and present some findings, never described before, including that the right parietal lobe contains significantly more edges, has higher average degree, density, larger minimum vertex cover and Hoffman bound than the left parietal lobe. Similar advantages in the deep graph connectivity properties are hold for the left frontal vs. the right frontal and for the right temporal vs. the left temporal lobes.