Applications of Network Science
to Understand the Brain
Huijuan Wang
Multimedia Computing Group
Intelligent Systems
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Open Question
Alzheimer’s Disease
How does healthy brain evolve?
Difference in the brain between health
control and patients with brain disease
Origin & development of
brain disease
Anatomical and Functional Brain Networks
Functional Brain Networks
Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
– 151 channel MEG
(N=151)
Weighted and unweighted Brain Networks
threshold
effect of the threshold T
weighted adjacency matrix W
Properties of Brain Networks
• Small-world (high clustering, short path length/hopcount)
• Power-law/scale-free degree distribution
• (Dis)Assortative at (anatomic)functional level
• Presence of modules
in anatomical and functional brain networks,
using neuroanatomical techniques, EEG, MEG and structural
and functional MRI
in organisms ranging from C. Elegans, Macaque to Humans.
L
L
Brain Network vs. IQ
van den Heuvel et al.
J Neurosci. 2009, 29(23):7619-24.
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Network Science Developed for the Brain
• Weighted and Spectral Network Analysis
H. Wang, L. Douw, J. M. Hernández, J.C. Reijneveld, C. J. Stam and P. Van
Mieghem, "Effect of tumor resection on the characteristics of functional brain
networks", Physical Review E 82 021924, 2010.
W. de Haan, W. M. van der Flier, H. Wang, P. Van Mieghem, P. Scheltens and C. J.
Stam, "Disruption of functional brain networks in Alzheimer’s disease: what
threshold
can we learn from graph spectral
analysis of resting-state MEG?", Brain
Connectivity, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 45-55,2012.
• Relations between Network Metrics
Li, C., H. Wang, W. de Haan, C. J. Stam, P. Van Mieghem, "The Correlation of
Metrics in Complex Networks with Applications in Functional Brain Networks",
Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment (JSTAT), P11018,
2011.
Network Science Developed for the Brain
• Network sampling methods
• Dynamics on brain networks
C. Stam, C. J., A. Hillebrand, H. Wang, and P. Van Mieghem, "Emergence of
modular structure in a large-scale threshold
brain network with interactions between
dynamics and connectivity", Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, Vol. 4,
article 133, pp. 1-13, 2010.
Thank You
Huijuan Wang
Intelligent Systems
H.Wang@tudelft.nl
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