Abstract
Brain tumors, particularly meningiomas and gliomas, can profoundly affect neural function, yet their impact on brain dynamics remains incompletely understood. This study investigates alterations in normal brain function among meningioma and glioma patients by assessing dynamical complexity through the Intrinsic Ignition Framework. We analyzed resting-state fMRI data from 34 participants to quantify brain dynamics using intrinsic ignition and metastability metrics. Our results revealed distinct patterns of disruption: glioma patients showed significant reductions in both metrics compared to controls, indicating widespread network disturbances. In contrast, meningioma patients exhibited significant changes predominantly in regions with substantial tumor involvement. Resting-state network analysis demonstrated strong metastability and metastability/ignition correlations between regions in controls, which were slightly weakened in meningioma patients and severely disrupted in glioma patients. These findings highlight the differential impacts of gliomas and meningiomas on brain function, offering insights into their distinct pathophysiological mechanisms. Furthermore, these results show that brain dynamics metrics can be effective biomarkers for identifying disruptions in brain information transmission caused by tumors.
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Data availability
This study utilized the Brain Tumor Connectomics Data, which contains pre-operative data from 11 glioma patients, 14 meningioma patients, and 11 control subjects previously described in [35, 38]. The dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.18112/openneuro.ds001226.v5.0.0.
Code availability
All code for implementing and reproducing our results is available at https://github.com/ajunca/BrainTumor.
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Funding
A.J., I.M., and G.P. were supported by Grant PID2021-122136OB-C22 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”, and AGAUR research support grant (ref. 2021 SGR 01035) funded by the Department of Research and Universities of the Generalitat of Catalunya. A.E. was supported by the project eBRAIN-Health - Actionable Multilevel Health Data (id 101058516), funded by the EU Horizon Europe and by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (ID: 101207460, NEUROCONTRA, HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01-01). G.D. is supported by Grant PID2022-136216NB-I00 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”, ERDF, EU, Project NEurological MEchanismS of Injury, and Sleep-like cellular dynamics (NEMESIS) (ref. 101071900) funded by the EU ERC Synergy Horizon Europe, and AGAUR research support grant (ref. 2021 SGR 00917) funded by the Department of Research and Universities of the Generalitat of Catalunya.
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A.J. and G.P. prepared the initial draft of the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript revision and corrections. A.J. and A.E. performed the experiments. A.J., G.P., and G.D. conceptualized the study. A.J. and I.M. implemented the methodology.
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Juncà, A., Escrichs, A., Martín, I. et al. Impact of meningioma and glioma on whole-brain dynamics. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-35140-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-35140-1
