{"id":"doi:10.1098/rsif.2014.0873","kind":"article","title":"Homological scaffolds of brain functional networks","authors":["Petri G","Expert P","Turkheimer F","Carhart-Harris R","Nutt D","Hellyer PJ","Vaccarino F"],"author_count":7,"year":2014,"published":"2014-12-01","venue":"Journal of the Royal Society, Interface","cited_by":309,"doi":"10.1098/rsif.2014.0873","arxiv_id":null,"nct_id":null,"source_url":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0873","archive_url":"https://space-kitty.com/papers/doi:10.1098/rsif.2014.0873","updated":null,"pmid":"25401177","pmcid":"PMC4223908","openalex_id":null,"pdf_url":"https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4223908/pdf","abstract":"Networks, as efficient representations of complex systems, have appealed to scientists for a long time and now permeate many areas of science, including neuroimaging (Bullmore and Sporns 2009 Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 10, 186-198. (doi:10.1038/nrn2618)). Traditionally, the structure of complex networks has been studied through their statistical properties and metrics concerned with node and link properties, e.g. degree-distribution, node centrality and modularity. Here, we study the characteristics of functional brain networks at the mesoscopic level from a novel perspective that highlights the role of inhomogeneities in the fabric of functional connections. This can be done by focusing on the features of a set of topological objects-homological cycles-associated with the weighted functional network. We leverage the detected topological information to define the homological scaffolds, a new set of objects designed to represent compactly the homological features of the correlation network and simultaneously make their homological properties amenable to networks theoretical methods. As a proof of principle,we apply these tools to compare resting state functional brain activity in 15 healthy volunteers after intravenous infusion of placebo and psilocybin-the main psychoactive component of magic mushrooms. The results show that the homological structure of the brain's functional patterns undergoes a dramatic change post-psilocybin, characterized by the appearance of many transient structures of low stability and of a small number of persistent ones that are not observed in the case of placebo.","abstract_license":"CC-BY (article license as recorded by Europe PMC; abstract reproduced unmodified apart from markup removal)","license":"CC-BY","is_open_access":true,"retracted":false,"peer_reviewed":null,"categories":[],"details":null,"provenance":"europepmc","attribution":"Abstract of \"Homological scaffolds of brain functional networks\" by Petri G, Expert P, Turkheimer F et al., https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0873, used under its Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY); markup removed, otherwise unmodified.","topics":[{"slug":"psychiatric-therapeutics","name":"Novel Psychiatric Therapeutics","domain_slug":"neuroscience"}],"cited_in_dossiers":[]}