Two-dimensional horizontal visibility graph analysis of human brain aging on gray matter

Abstract

Characterizing the trajectory of the healthy aging brain and exploring age-related structural changes in the brain can help deepen our understanding of the mechanism of brain aging. Currently, most structural magnetic resonance imaging literature explores brain aging merely from the perspective of morphological features, which cannot fully utilize the gray-scale values containing important intrinsic information about brain structure. In this study, we propose the construction of two-dimensional horizontal visibility graphs based on the pixel intensity values of the gray matter slices directly. Normalized network structure entropy (NNSE) is then introduced to quantify the overall heterogeneities of these graphs. The results demonstrate a decrease in the NNSEs of gray matter with age. Compared with the middle-aged and the elderly, the larger values of the NNSE in the younger group may indicate more homogeneous network structures, smaller differences in importance between nodes and thus a more powerful ability to tolerate intrusion. In addition, the hub nodes of different adult age groups are primarily located in the precuneus, cingulate gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, inferior temporal gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, insula, precentral gyrus and postcentral gyrus. Our study can provide a new perspective for understanding and exploring the structural mechanism of brain aging.