Comparison of brain connectomes using geodesic distance on manifold:a twin study
This work addresses the need for better methods to compare brain connectomes in neuroscience, particularly for understanding genetic influences on functional networks, but it is incremental as it applies a novel distance metric to existing twin data.
The study tackled the problem of assessing similarity in functional brain networks using fMRI data from twins, and found that monozygotic twins have more similar networks than dizygotic twins, with higher similarity in task-relevant networks compared to task-orthogonal ones.
fMRI is a unique non-invasive approach for understanding the functional organization of the human brain, and task-based fMRI promotes identification of functionally relevant brain regions associated with a given task. Here, we use fMRI (using the Poffenberger Paradigm) data collected in mono- and dizygotic twin pairs to propose a novel approach for assessing similarity in functional networks. In particular, we compared network similarity between pairs of twins in task-relevant and task-orthogonal networks. The proposed method measures the similarity between functional networks using a geodesic distance between graph Laplacians. With method we show that networks are more similar in monozygotic twins compared to dizygotic twins. Furthermore, the similarity in monozygotic twins is higher for task-relevant, than task-orthogonal networks.