SCL Seminar by Bosiljka Tadić
You are cordially invited to the SCL seminar of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, which will be held on Thursday, 10 October 2019 at 14:00 in the library reading room “Dr. Dragan Popović" of the Institute of Physics Belgrade. The talk entitled
Computational Modeling of the Brain & Hidden Structure of Human Connectomes
will be given by Prof. Dr. Bosiljka Tadić (Department of Theoretical Physics, Jožef Stefan Institute Ljubljana, Slovenia and Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, Austria). Abstract of the talk:
The modern science of the brain explores how the brain's anatomical parts and complex pathways between them govern human activity, psychology and behaviour. A network that maps the organization of neuronal connections between brain regions is known as the human connectome. Currently, a large amount of experimental data has been collected within the Human Connectome Project (HCP) to enable different aspects of brain research. However, the procedure to extract the network from the fMRI or another brain imaging methods, as well as the analysis of whole-brain networks, requires specific computational modelling approaches. In this seminar, we briefly review the necessary procedures preceding the construction of a brain network and describe some parameters that affect the outcome. Further, we discuss in detail [1] the consensus connectomes, that we generate for a specified set of parameters on the Budapest Conenctome Server [2] based on HCP data. By analyzing higher-order connections, we show how the consensus connectomes of female subjects systematically differ from the one for male subjects. Meanwhile, their standard graph-theoretic properties remain self-similar. These robust gender differences within the higher-order connectivity in human brain networks imply their different functional properties; whereas, the understanding of the origin and interpretation of these differences remain beyond the mathematical modelling framework.
[1] B. Tadić, M. Andjelković, R. Melnik, Functional geometry of human connectomes, Scientific Reports 9:12060 (2019).
[2] B. Szalkai, C. Kerepesi, B. Varga, V. Grolmusz, Parameterizable Consensus Connectomes from the Human Connectome Project: The Budapest Reference Connectome Server v3.0, Cognitive Neurodynamics, (2016).
