Monash Clinical and Imaging Neuroscience, School of Psychology and Psychiatry and Monash Biomedical Imaging, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia.
Neuroimage. 2013 Oct 15;80:426-44. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.04.087. Epub 2013 Apr 30.
The human brain is a complex, interconnected network par excellence. Accurate and informative mapping of this human connectome has become a central goal of neuroscience. At the heart of this endeavor is the notion that brain connectivity can be abstracted to a graph of nodes, representing neural elements (e.g., neurons, brain regions), linked by edges, representing some measure of structural, functional or causal interaction between nodes. Such a representation brings connectomic data into the realm of graph theory, affording a rich repertoire of mathematical tools and concepts that can be used to characterize diverse anatomical and dynamical properties of brain networks. Although this approach has tremendous potential - and has seen rapid uptake in the neuroimaging community - it also has a number of pitfalls and unresolved challenges which can, if not approached with due caution, undermine the explanatory potential of the endeavor. We review these pitfalls, the prevailing solutions to overcome them, and the challenges at the forefront of the field.
人脑是一个复杂的、相互关联的网络系统。准确而详细地绘制人类连接组图谱已成为神经科学的主要目标。这一努力的核心是这样一种观点,即大脑的连接性可以被抽象为一个节点图,其中节点代表神经元素(例如神经元、脑区),节点之间的边代表节点之间某种结构、功能或因果相互作用的度量。这种表示形式将连接组学数据带入了图论的领域,提供了丰富的数学工具和概念,可以用来描述大脑网络的各种解剖学和动力学特性。尽管这种方法具有巨大的潜力——并且在神经影像学领域得到了迅速的应用——但它也存在一些陷阱和未解决的挑战,如果不谨慎对待,可能会破坏这一努力的解释潜力。我们回顾了这些陷阱、克服这些陷阱的流行解决方案,以及该领域前沿的挑战。