Higher-order interaction of brain microstructural and functional connectome

COEX 

Despite a relatively fixed anatomical structure, the human brain can support rich cognitive functions, triggering particular interest in investigating structure-function relationships (Honey, Sporns et al. 2009). Myelin is a vital brain microstructure marker; however, most myelin studies have constructed a structural covariance network at the population level, making individual cognitive or behavioral predictions impossible. Therefore, examining the myelin microstructural and functional relationship at the individual level is urgently needed but is still elusive. Recently, higher-order representations (beyond the node or edge level) emerged, including simplicial complexes (Giusti, Pastalkova et al. 2015), persistent homology (Liang and Wang 2017), neural network (Suárez, Richards et al. 2021), subgraphs (Przulj 2007), and motifs (Benson, Gleich et al. 2016), which have proven to be extremely useful in understanding and comparing complex networks. Nevertheless, few studies have examined individual myelin microstructure-function relationships using higher-order representations. Here, we quantify the individual-level microstructure-function relationship using a higher-order framework and explore the microstructure-function higher-order relationship across individual cognitive scores, development and network scale.