Fig. 7: Comparative analysis of GWM-HFN connectivity between ASD and TC groups.

A Boxplot illustrating the global mean GWM-HFN connectivity across 13 acquisition sites before and after harmonization. The red diamond indicates the mean connectivity within each site, while the gray line represents the overall mean connectivity across all sites. B Raincloud plot comparing the global-averaged GWM-HFN and GM-GM connectivity strengths between the ASD and TC groups. C Left panel: Brain network depicting the significantly different GWM-HFN connections identified between the ASD and TC groups, with all significant connections showing greater connectivity in the ASD group (ASD > TC), indicated by red. Right panel: Brain network illustrating the significantly different GM-GM connections identified between the ASD and TC groups, with the majority of connections exhibiting greater connectivity in the ASD group (ASD > TC), indicated by red. Connections showing decreased connectivity in the ASD group (ASD < TC) are indicated by blue. Line thickness corresponds to the magnitude of the effect size. D Scatterplot comparing the p-values of group differences for GWM-HFN and GM-GM functional connections. The two red dashed lines indicate the threshold for significance after FDR correction (\({P}_{{\mathrm{FDR}}} < 0.05\)). Data points are color-coded based on the significance of the connection: light yellow for connections significant in both the GWM-HFN and GM-GM analyses, light red for connections significant only in the GWM-HFN analysis, and light blue for connections significant only in the GM-GM analysis. E Brain connectivity map visualizing connections that were significant only in the GWM-HFN analysis, significant only in the GM-GM analysis, and significant in both analyses. F Bar plots quantifying the distribution of significant edges from the ASD versus TC group comparison, comparing the number of altered within-network and between-network connections for both the GWM-HFN and GM-GM frameworks. G Scatterplot showing the significant negative Pearson correlation between the mean connectivity strength of the altered edges and the ADOS-G total scores for both the GWM-HFN and GM-GM frameworks. The red line depicts the fitted linear regression, and the shaded region represents the 95% confidence interval of the linear fit. n = 368 TC and n = 272 ASD biologically independent participants.