Abstract
Lesions of anatomical brain networks result in functional disturbances of brain systems and behavior which depend sensitively, often unpredictably, on the lesion site. The availability of whole-brain maps of structural connections within the human cerebrum and our increased understanding of the physiology and large-scale dynamics of cortical networks allow us to investigate the functional consequences of focal brain lesions in a computational model. We simulate the dynamic effects of lesions placed in different regions of the cerebral cortex by recording changes in the pattern of endogenous (“resting-state”) neural activity. We find that lesions produce specific patterns of altered functional connectivity among distant regions of cortex, often affecting both cortical hemispheres. The magnitude of these dynamic effects depends on the lesion location and is partly predicted by structural network properties of the lesion site. In the model, lesions along the cortical midline and in the vicinity of the temporo-parietal junction result in large and widely distributed changes in functional connectivity, while lesions of primary sensory or motor regions remain more localized. The model suggests that dynamic lesion effects can be predicted on the basis of specific network measures of structural brain networks and that these effects may be related to known behavioral and cognitive consequences of brain lesions.
Highlights
Recent advances in noninvasive imaging technology have allowed the creation of comprehensive whole-brain maps of the structural connections of the human cerebrum [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
We describe a model of lesion effects in the human brain, based on a previously published map of structural connections [4] and a biophysical model of endogenous neural dynamics [8]
Can we predict the functional impact of such lesions on the basis of a computational model of the brain’s structure and dynamics? Numerous other systems that form complex networks have been analyzed for their vulnerability to structural damage
Summary
Recent advances in noninvasive imaging technology have allowed the creation of comprehensive whole-brain maps of the structural connections of the human cerebrum [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. These maps have led to the quantitative characterization of various aspects of the network architecture of the brain, including degree distributions, small-world attributes, centrality and modularity. Vulnerability analyses [20,21,22,23,24] of several non-human primate cortical networks suggest that lesion effects show regional specificity as well as nonlocal and distributed effects
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