Gender differences in cortical morphological networks
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Gender differences in cortical morphological networks Ahmed Nebli 1,2 & Islem Rekik 1,3
# The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Cortical morphological networks (CMN), where each network models the relationship in morphology between different cortical brain regions quantified using a specific measurement (e.g., cortical thickness), have not been investigated with respect to gender differences in the human brain. Cortical processes are expected to involve complex interactions between different brain regions, univariate methods thus might overlook informative gender markers. Hence, by leveraging machine learning techniques with the potential to highlight multivariate interacting effects, we found that the most discriminative CMN connections between males and females were derived from the left hemisphere using the mean sulcal depth as measurement. However, for both left and right hemispheres, the first most discriminative morphological connection revealed across all cortical attributes involved (entorhinal cortex ↔ caudal anterior cingulate cortex) and (entorhinal cortex ↔ transverse temporal cortex) respectively, which gives us new insights into behavioral gender differences from an omics perspective and might explain why males and females learn differently. Keywords Cortical morphological networks . Gender differences . Feature selection . T1-weighted MRI . Brain connectivity . Cortical morphology . Sulcal depth
Introduction The brain construct encodes subtle differences in cognitive functions between men and women. These differences emerge during foetus development period where research has shown that male fetuses appear to involute fewer overproduced cortical neurons than females (De Courten-Myers 1999). This gender difference could explain in part that the male brain undergoes greater functional impairments from early brain damage whereas the female brain exhibits a higher incidence and prevalence of dementia. Hence, since several brain disorders can be related to gender, it is important to first pin down gender differences in the healthy human brain. This can potentially help devise a personalized treatment for different neurological disorders, tailored for male and female * Islem Rekik [email protected] 1
BASIRA Lab, Faculty of Computer and Informatics, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey
2
Higher Institute of Applied Science and Technologies (ISSAT), University of Sousse, Sousse, Tunisia
3
Computing, School of Science and Engineering, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK
populations, respectively. In particular, the cortex is a multifolded complex shape nesting vital brain function and cognition. Such complexity cannot be solely grasped using lowlevel region to region comparison approaches across two groups. Hence, we resort to modeling the brain as a network, where the interaction between regions becomes a biological feature of interest. A plethora of research studies investigated gender differences using brain network datasets (i.e., brain connectomics) in both health and disease bas
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