Sketching a Space of Brain States

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal framework to model brain states as points in a space, capturing disease progression through paths between healthy and diseased configurations, with applications to neurological disorders.

Contribution

It provides a novel formal and computational representation of the brain state space and models disease progression as paths within this space.

Findings

Formal definition of brain state space

Application to Parkinson's, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's

Potential for generalized disease modeling

Abstract

Brain functional connectivity alterations, that is, pathological changes in the signal exchange between areas of the brain, occur in several neurological diseases, including neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric ones. They consist in changes in how brain functional networks operate. By conceptualising a brain space as a space whose points are connectome configurations representing brain functional states, changes in brain network functionality can be represented by paths between these points. Paths from a healthy state to a diseased one, or between diseased states as instances of disease progression, are modelled as the action of the Krankheit-Operator, which produces changes from a brain functional state to another. This study proposes a formal representation of the space of brain states and presents its computational definition. References to patients affected by Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer-Perusini's disease are included to discuss the proposed approach and possible developments of the research toward a generalisation.