Figure 5
From: Disrupted brain structural connectivity in Pediatric Bipolar Disorder with psychosis
Modular network analysis. The figure shows the patterns of inter-modular (left column), intra-modular (middle column) and connector-hub driven inter-modular (right column) connectivity, for patients with PBD with psychosis (top row) and HC (bottom row). Modular connectivity strength is quantified as the total number of connections (degree) of all nodes forming a module. The resulting community structure for the HC population was selected as the reference scheme for group modular connectivity analysis, given its higher group goodness-of-fit (i.e. how well the group estimated community structure fits to each subject’s individual community structure). The figure shows that the patterns of SC between modules are changed in PBD. Specifically, that the connectivity of module 4 (right hemisphere; thalamus, insula, basal ganglia, anterior cingulate, precentral gyrus and regions covering most of the frontal cortex) is increased to module 1 (right hemisphere; amygdala, hippocampus, parahippocampus, fusiform gyrus, and other regions of the occipital and temporal cortices) and decreased to module 3 (left hemisphere; thalamus, basal ganglia, anterior cingulate and a large extension of the frontal cortex), whereas module 1 has overall increased inter-modular connectivity but decreased connector-hub driven inter-modular connectivity. The latter suggests an increased degree of sparsity in inter-modular linkage for module 1 (i.e. more connections, though a less prominent role of its connector-hubs in mediating inter-modular connectivity). Despite the absence of connector-hubs in module 4 in PBD, its mean inter-modular connectivity strength is the second largest across modules and similar to HC (with two connector-hubs). This suggests that more nodes (with no ‘hub’ or ‘connector’ profile) are mediating communication between module 4 and the remaining modules in PBD, thus indicating decreased selectivity and efficiency in processing communication between a network including the left hemisphere limbic, insular and thalamic areas, and the rest of the brain.
