The Resilience and Vulnerability of Human Brain Networks Across the Lifespan.

Pin Shu,Junfeng Sun,Jie Zhou,Wen Jin,Shanbao Tong,Hong Zhu

doi:10.1109/tnsre.2021.3105991

Pin Shu, Junfeng Sun + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/tnsre.2021.3105991

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Abstract

Resilience, the ability for a system to maintain its basic functionality when suffering from lesions, is a critical property for human brain, especially in the brain aging process. This study adopted a novel metric of network resilience, the Resilience Index (RI), to assess human brain resilience with three different lifespan datasets. Based on the structural brain networks constructed from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), we observed an inverted-U relationship between RI and age, that is, RI increased during development and early adulthood, reached a peak at about 35 years old, and then decreased during aging, which suggested that brain resilience could be quantified by RI. Furthermore, we studied brain network vulnerability by the decreases in RI when virtual lesions occurred to nodes (i.e., brain regions) or edges (i.e., structural brain connectivity). We found that the strong edges were markedly vulnerable, and the homotopic edges were the most prominent representatives of vulnerable edges. In other words, an arbitrary attack on homotopic edges would have a high probability to degrade brain network resilience. These findings suggest the change of human brain resilience across the lifespan and provide a new perspective for exploring human brain vulnerability.

Highlights

THE ability that brain could withstand lesions and maintain its basic functionality is called brain resilience
For the Nathan Kline Institute-Rockland Sample (NKI-RS) dataset, we found that mental disorders had no significant impact on the age-related Resilience Index (RI) values by using a general linear model
Regarding the spatial embedding feature, the 86 strongest edges were classified into three types: 13 homotopic edges, 52 inter-hemispheric edges and 21 intra-hemispheric edges (Fig. 7(a)). Normalized by their corresponding number of edges in all the 546 possible edges, we found that the proportion of the intra-hemispheric edges was far smaller than that of the other two types of edges (Fig. 7(b))

Summary

Introduction

THE ability that brain could withstand lesions and maintain its basic functionality is called brain resilience. It seems that the effects of lesions in different locations have no. The first dataset was from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN). The resilience and vulnerability of human brain networks is worthy of research and has motivated numerous empirical and computational studies [9, 10]

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