Altered connectedness of the brain chronnectome during the progression of Alzheimer's disease

TL;DR

This paper introduces new graph-theoretic measures, connectedness and 2-connectedness, to analyze brain network topology changes during Alzheimer's disease progression, offering potentially more comprehensive insights than traditional metrics.

Contribution

It presents novel global properties, connectedness and 2-connectedness, for brain network analysis, expanding beyond traditional shortest path and cost-efficiency metrics.

Findings

New measures reveal altered brain network connectedness in Alzheimer's disease.

Connectedness metrics differentiate stages of disease progression.

Provides a broader understanding of brain network changes in neurodegeneration.

Abstract

Graph theory has been extensively used to investigate brain network topology and its changes in disease cohorts. However, many graph theoretic analysis-based brain network studies focused on the shortest paths or, more generally, cost-efficiency. In this work, we use two new concepts, connectedness and 2-connectedness, to measure different global properties compared to the previously widely adopted ones.