title: The overlapping community structure of structural brain network in young healthy individuals.
abstract: Community structure is a universal and significant feature of many complex networks in biology, society, and economics. Community structure has also been revealed in human brain structural and functional networks in previous studies. However, communities overlap and share many edges and nodes. Uncovering the overlapping community structure of complex networks remains largely unknown in human brain networks. Here, using regional gray matter volume, we investigated the structural brain network among 90 brain regions (according to a predefined anatomical atlas) in 462 young, healthy individuals. Overlapped nodes between communities were defined by assuming that nodes (brain regions) can belong to more than one community. We demonstrated that 90 brain regions were organized into 5 overlapping communities associated with several well-known brain systems, such as the auditory/language, visuospatial, emotion, decision-making, social, control of action, memory/learning, and visual systems. The overlapped nodes were mostly involved in an inferior-posterior pattern and were primarily related to auditory and visual perception. The overlapped nodes were mainly attributed to brain regions with higher node degrees and nodal efficiency and played a pivotal role in the flow of information through the structural brain network. Our results revealed fuzzy boundaries between communities by identifying overlapped nodes and provided new insights into the understanding of the relationship between the structure and function of the human brain. This study provides the first report of the overlapping community structure of the structural network of the human brain.
authors.affiliation: Department of Nuclear Medicine and Radiology, Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan. kai.wu.22@gmail.com
authors.forename: Kai
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Yasuyuki
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Taki
authors.forename: Kazunori
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Sato
authors.forename: Yuko
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sassa
authors.forename: Kentaro
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Inoue
authors.forename: Ryoi
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Goto
authors.forename: Ken
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Okada
authors.forename: Ryuta
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kawashima
authors.forename: Yong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: He
authors.forename: Alan C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Evans
authors.forename: Hiroshi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Fukuda
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006262:Health; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult