Brain community detection in the general children population

The fingerprint is known to be unique in every individual, and there is evidence that such individuality exists with the brain. Neuroimaging studies that research brain fingerprint patterns typically consider relationships between individuals and their brain patterns. However, there remains a question as to how such fingerprint patterns can be grouped among the general population. In this study, we implemented clustering-based methods to evaluate whether such subgrouping exists among individuals and evaluated the relationships between these clusters and individuals’ developmental, cognitive, demographical, psychological status in the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study cohort. Multiplex community detection and K-means clustering revealed the existence of clusters in our cohort, as well as significant group differences between these clusters in these datasets, indicative of heterogeneous subgrouping of brain fingerprint patterns in the general population.

I. Introduction

Evidence of "fingerprint" patterns of the brain have been found in previous studies with brain structure, function, and signals. Brain anatomical features, "brain prints", can be differentiated between individuals for cortical thickness, area, and volume [1]. Functional brain connectivity profiles have been used for identification of individuals and prediction of cognitive behavior [2]–[4]. Significant group differences have been found between localized regions ("fingerprints") of brain white matter connectivity across monozygotic twins, dizygotic twins, non-twin siblings, and other genetically unrelated subjects [5]. These studies all indicate that individuals can be characterized based on brain "fingerprint" patterns. However, are there individuals that share some commonalities? In other words, is there evidence of subgrouping of individuals? To our best knowledge, no work has been done with clustering brain fingerprint patterns in a cohort. Under the hypothesis that a natural subgrouping might exist in the general population of children in terms of brain structure and function, which could partially underlie the heterogeneity in the brain responses to stimuli observed in fMRI data [6], we performed a pilot attempt to answer this question in this study.