Achievement

Real-world complex systems may be mathematically modeled as graphs, revealing properties of the system. Trainees Power, Vogel, and Cohen and professors Petersen and Schlaggar studied graphs of functional brain organization in healthy adults using resting state functional connectivity MRI. They proposed two novel brain-wide graphs, one of 264 putative functional areas, the other a modification of voxelwise networks that eliminates potentially artificial short-distance relationships. These graphs contained many subgraphs in good agreement with known functional brain systems. Further, graph measures of the areal network indicated that the default mode subgraph shares network properties with sensory and motor subgraphs: it is internally integrated but isolated from other subgraphs, much like a “processing” system. The modified voxelwise graph also reveals spatial motifs in the patterning of systems across the cortex. This work was published in Neuron.