Qingchun Lin1 · Suhui Jin1 · Guole Yin1 · Junle Li1 · Umer Asgher2,3 · Shijun Qiu4 · Jinhui Wang1,5,6,71 Institute for Brain Research and Rehabilitation, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China
2 Department of Air Transport, Faculty of Transportation Sciences, Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU), Prague 128 00, Czech Republic
3 School of Interdisciplinary Engineering and Sciences (SINES), National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Islamabad 44000, Pakistan
4 Department of Radiology, The First Afliated Hospital of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou 510405, China
5 Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences, Ministry of Education, Guangzhou 510631, China
6 Center for Studies of Psychological Application, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China
7 Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China
Abstract
This study explored how the human cortical folding pattern composed of convex gyri and concave sulci affected single-subject morphological brain networks, which are becoming an important method for studying the human brain connectome. We found that gyri-gyri networks exhibited higher morphological similarity, lower small-world parameters, and lower long-term test-retest reliability than sulci-sulci networks for cortical thickness- and gyrification index-based networks, while opposite patterns were observed for fractal dimension-based networks. Further behavioral association analysis revealed that gyri-gyri networks and connections between gyral and sulcal regions significantly explained inter-individual variance in Cognition and Motor domains for fractal dimension- and sulcal depth-based networks. Finally, the clinical application showed that only sulci-sulci networks exhibited morphological similarity reductions in major depressive disorder for cortical thickness-, fractal dimension-, and gyrification index-based networks. Taken together, these findings provide novel insights into the constraint of the cortical folding pattern to the network organization of the human brain.
Keywords
Morphological connectivity; Magnetic resonance imaging; Test-retest reliability; Cortical folding; Graph theory
