Although anomalies in the topological architecture of whole-brain connectivity have been found to be associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), our understanding about the progression of AD in a functional connectivity (FC) perspective is still rudimentary and few study has explored the function-structure relations in brain networks of AD patients. By using resting-state functional MRI (fMRI), this study firstly investigated organizational alternations in FC networks in 12 AD patients, 15 amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) patients, and 14 age-matched healthy aging subjects and found that all three groups exhibit economical small-world network properties. Nonetheless, we found a decline of the optimal architecture in the progression of AD, represented by a more localized modular organization with less efficient local information transfer. Our results also show that aMCI forms a boundary between normal aging and AD and represents a functional continuum between healthy aging and the earliest signs of dementia. Moreover, we revealed a dissociated relationship between the overall FC and structural connectivity (SC) in AD patients. In this study, diffusion tensor imaging tractography was used to map the structural network of the same individuals. The decreased FC-SC coupling may be indicative of more stringent and less dynamic brain function in AD patients. Our findings provided insightful implications for understanding the pathophysiological mechanisms of brain dysfunctions in aMCI and AD patients and demonstrated that functional disorders can be characterized by multimodal neuroimaging-based metrics.
Recently a new framework has been proposed to explore the dynamics of pseudoperiodic time series by constructing a complex network [Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 238701 (2006)]. Essentially, this is a transformation from the time domain to the network domain, which allows for the dynamics of the time series to be studied via the organization of the network. In this paper, we focus on the deterministic chaotic Rössler time series and stochastic noisy periodic data that yield substantially different structures of the networks. In particular, we test an extensive range of network topology statistics, which have not be discussed in previous works, but which are capable of providing a comprehensive statistical characterization of the dynamics from different angles. Our goal is to find out how they reflect and quantify different aspects of specific dynamics, and how they can be used to distinguish different dynamical regimes. For example, we find that the joint degree distribution appears to fundamentally characterize the spatial organizations of the cycles in phase space, and this is quantified via assortativity coefficient. We applied the network statistics to the electrocardiograms of a healthy individual and an arrythmia patient. Such time series are typically pseudoperiodic, but are noisy and nonstationary and degrade traditional phase-space based methods. These time series are, however, better differentiated by our network-based statistics.
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