Multilevel Network Model for Brain Structural-functional Connectivity Coupling

Music City Center 

The network model for brain structural-functional connectivity coupling is challenging because both structural and functional brain connectivity (SC and FC) exhibit organized and complex network structures. We represent SC and FC as graphs, where nodes denote brain regions and edges represent connections. The node sets for SC and FC networks may differ. Our focus is on assessing which sets of SC edges are associated with sets of FC edges and understanding the underlying network topological structure. We propose a triple-layer network model to capture the complex associations and identify dense SC-FC subgraph pairs. In a dense SC-FC subgraph pair, we maximize the proportion of SC-FC related edges in both SC and FC subgraphs while ensuring that most related SC-FC edges are covered by SC-FC subgraph pairs. We conduct extensive simulations and apply the proposed method to data from the Human Connectome Project and UK Biobank.

brain network

structural network

functional network

shrinkage

coupling