Identifying Super-Feminine, Super-Masculine and Sex-Defining Connections in the Human Braingraph

TL;DR

This study identifies specific brain connections in human connectomes that are highly indicative of sex, revealing superfeminine and supermasculine edges that can determine gender with high accuracy using diffusion MRI data.

Contribution

The paper introduces a method to pinpoint a small set of brain connections that accurately determine sex and identifies edges with extreme weights that are characteristic of either females or males.

Findings

102 connections out of 1950 can determine sex precisely

Two edges are superfeminine, indicating female subjects when high

Three edges are supermasculine, indicating male subjects when two are high and one is low

Abstract

For more than a decade now, we can discover and study thousands of cerebral connections with the application of diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) techniques and the accompanying algorithmic workflow. While numerous connectomical results were published enlightening the relation between the braingraph and certain biological, medical, and psychological properties, it is still a great challenge to identify a small number of brain connections, closely related to those conditions. In the present contribution, by applying the 1200 Subjects Release of the Human Connectome Project (HCP), we identify just 102 connections out of the total number of 1950 connections in the 83-vertex graphs of 1065 subjects, which -- by a simple linear test -- precisely, without any error determine the sex of the subject. Very surprisingly, we were able to identify two graph edges out of these 102, if, whose weights, measured in fiber numbers, are all high, then the connectome always belongs to a female subject, independently of the other edges. Similarly, we have identified 3 edges from these 102, whose weights, if two of them are high and one is low, imply that the graph belongs to a male subject -- again, independently of the other edges. We call the former 2 edges superfeminine and the first two of the 3 edges supermasculine edges of the human connectome. Even more interestingly, one of the edges, connecting the right Pars Triangularis and the right Superior Parietal areas, is one of the 2 superfeminine edges, and it is also the third edge, accompanying the two supermasculine connections, if its weight is low; therefore it is also a "switching" connection.