Neural Circuits and Systems Neuroscience
Author: Sebastián Risau Gusman | email: srisaug@gmail.com
Sebastián Risau Gusman 1°, Tomás Hüttebräucker 1°, Álvaro Planchuelo-Gómez 2°, David García-Azorín 3°, Ángel L. Guerrero 3°, Rodrigo de Luis-García 2°
1° Departamento de Física Médica, Centro Atómico Bariloche
2° Laboratorio de Procesado de Imagen, Universidad de Valladolid
3° Servicio de Neurología, Hospital Clínico Universitario de Valladolid
The human brain can be characterized as a set of interconnected regions, using the idea of connectome. In migraine sufferers, the connectome is altered, in that some connections are significantly different between migraineurs and healthy subjects. However, relating these alterations to the symptoms of migraine is a difficult task. One possible approach is to study their effect on the dynamic processes taking place in the brain connectome. One ubicuous process is the synchronization of neuronal populations. It depends on the network and also on the specific synchronizing units, but the contribution of network structure can be calculated independently, defining the network synchronizability. To study the correlation between migraine and synchronizability and connectivity we analyzed data from diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance (dMRI) images of episodic and chronic migraine patients (CM) and healthy controls (HC). We found that whole-brain synchronizability is significantly enhanced in CM than in HC. Moreover, this enhancement is larger in subnetworks containing regions from different hemispheres. In agreement with this, we found that the number of interhemispheric streamlines is significantly larger in CM than in HC, whereas no such difference appears for intrahemispheric streamlines. We also found that the largest contribution comes from the interhemispheric connections from three regions: left superior frontal cortex, right precentral cortex, and right caudate.