Abnormal Functional Brain Networks in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's Disease: A Minimum Spanning Tree Analysis
Abstract
Alzheimer's disease (AD) disrupts the topological architecture of whole-brain connectivity. Minimum spanning tree (MST), which captures the most important connections in a network, has been considered an unbiased method for brain network analysis. However, the alterations in the MST of functional brain networks during the progression of AD remain unclear. Here, we performed an MST analysis to examine the alterations in functional networks among normal controls (NCs), mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients, and AD patients. We identified substantial differences in the connections among the three groups. The maximum betweenness centrality, leaf number, and tree hierarchy of the MSTs showed significant group differences, indicating a more star-like topology in the MCI patients and a more line-like topology in the NCs and AD patients. These findings may correspond to changes in the core of the functional brain networks. For nodal properties (degree and betweenness centrality), we determined that brain regions around the cingulate gyrus, occipital lobes, subcortex, and inferior temporal gyrus showed significant differences among the three groups and contributed to the global topological alterations. The leaf number and tree hierar...Continue Reading
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Disrupted brain network topology in Parkinson's disease: a longitudinal magnetoencephalography study
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