No abstract

Gender is known to play a critical role in the brain's anatomy, function, and also in human behavior. Identifying differences in functional connectivity between male and female brains will help explain the prevalence and symptomatology of many neurological and psychiatric conditions. Imaging of the brain during rest reveals spontaneous low-frequency fluctuations (<0.1 Hz) that have a temporal correlation between functionally related areas in the fMRI signal. These correlations, called functional connectivity (FC), were obtained using seed to voxel analysis. FC analyzes were compared between male and female brains, including 50 healthy individuals (25 females, 25 males) using the right hand between aged 19 to 41 years old, using resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). Data in this study was obtained from the Newyork_a data set under the 1000 Functional Connectomes Project shared publicly. In our study, gender differences in the default mode network, which is shown as having a central role among the rest state networks, and in the fronto parietal network that best reflects the cognitive network, were examined. In some seed regions of our study, regions showing higher FC were found in both female and male. While the seed regions showing positive correlation in DMN are MPFC and LP (L), the seed region showing negative correlation is LP (L). The seed regions that show positive correlation in FPN are LPFC (L), LPFC (R) and PPC (L), while the seed regions that show negative correlation are LPFC (R), PPC (L) and PPC (R). As the result of our study, the most important finding is that all of our regions with positive correlation were associated with the cerebellum. Our regions associated with regions that show negative correlation showed scattered settlement in the brain. Our study revealed that gender differences in brain networks should be considered when examining neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. In addition, our results have shown that gender differences in brain networks require more research.