Abstract
Cortical morphological networks (CMN), where each network models the relationship in morphology between different cortical brain regions quantified using a specific measurement (e.g., cortical thickness), have not been investigated with respect to gender differences in the human brain. Cortical processes are expected to involve complex interactions between different brain regions, univariate methods thus might overlook informative gender markers. Hence, by leveraging machine learning techniques with the potential to highlight multivariate interacting effects, we found that the most discriminative CMN connections between males and females were derived from the left hemisphere using the mean sulcal depth as measurement. However, for both left and right hemispheres, the first most discriminative morphological connection revealed across all cortical attributes involved (entorhinal cortex ↔ caudal anterior cingulate cortex) and (entorhinal cortex ↔ transverse temporal cortex) respectively, which gives us new insights into behavioral gender differences from an omics perspective and might explain why males and females learn differently.
Highlights
The brain construct encodes subtle differences in cognitive functions between men and women
For instance (Gur and Gur 2017a), found that females have a better memory speed and accuracy while (Im et al 2008) found that sulcal depth plays a major role in memory construction, which might give insights into gender differences
To the best of our knowledge, while no study had investigated the role of the left-hemispheric sulcal depth in gender differences (Tian et al 2011), found that males and females are both globally efficient in their right hemisphere but females are more locally efficient in their left hemisphere, which indicates strong gender-related differences in the left hemisphere
Summary
The brain construct encodes subtle differences in cognitive functions between men and women These differences emerge during foetus development period where research has shown that male fetuses appear to involute fewer overproduced cortical neurons than females (De Courten-Myers 1999). This gender difference could explain in part that the male brain undergoes greater functional impairments from early brain damage whereas the female brain exhibits a higher incidence and prevalence of dementia. The cortex is a multifolded complex shape nesting vital brain function and cognition. Such complexity cannot be solely grasped using lowlevel region to region comparison approaches across two groups. We resort to modeling the brain as a network, where the interaction between regions becomes a biological feature of interest
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