Community structure detection and evaluation during the pre- and post-ictal hippocampal depth recordings

TL;DR

This study compares community detection methods on hippocampal brain networks derived from correlation and coherency matrices, revealing finer structures with correlation-based networks and analyzing the impact of window sizes.

Contribution

It is the first to analyze four different clustering methods on correlation-based brain networks during pre- and post-ictal states, highlighting differences from coherency-based networks.

Findings

Correlation matrices reveal finer community structures.

Correlation-based networks differ significantly from coherency-based ones.

Window size affects the smoothing and detection of communities.

Abstract

Detecting and evaluating regions of brain under various circumstances is one of the most interesting topics in computational neuroscience. However, the majority of the studies on detecting communities of a functional connectivity network of the brain is done on networks obtained from coherency attributes, and not from correlation. This lack of studies, in part, is due to the fact that many common methods for clustering graphs require the nodes of the network to be `positively' linked together, a property that is guaranteed by a coherency matrix, by definition. However, correlation matrices reveal more information regarding how each pair of nodes are linked together. In this study, for the first time we simultaneously examine four inherently different network clustering methods (spectral, heuristic, and optimization methods) applied to the functional connectivity networks of the CA1 region of the hippocampus of an anaesthetized rat during pre-ictal and post-ictal states. The networks are obtained from correlation matrices, and its results are compared with the ones obtained by applying the same methods to coherency matrices. The correlation matrices show a much finer community structure compared to the coherency matrices. Furthermore, we examine the potential smoothing effect of choosing various window sizes for computing the correlation/coherency matrices.