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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2021.10.20.465211

Executive and Attentional Resting-State Hubs of the Human Cortical Connectome Revealed by a Causal Discovery Method for Data-Driven Effective Connectivity Analysis

Rawls, E.·Kummerfeld, E.·Mueller, B. A.·Ma, S.·Zilverstand, A.
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Abstract

We demonstrate a data-driven approach for calculating a "causal connectome" of directed connectivity from resting-state fMRI data using a greedy adjacency search and pairwise non-Gaussian edge orientations. We used this approach to construct n=442 causal connectomes. These connectomes were very sparse in comparison to typical Pearson correlation-based graphs (roughly 2.25% edge density) yet were fully connected in nearly all cases. Prominent highly connected hubs of the causal connectome were situated in attentional (dorsal attention) and executive (frontoparietal and cingulo-opercular) networks. These hub networks had distinctly different connectivity profiles: attentional networks shared incoming connections with sensory regions and outgoing connections with higher cognitive networks, while executive networks primarily connected to other higher cognitive networks and had a high degree of bidirected connectivity. Virtual lesion analyses accentuated these findings, demonstrating that attentional and executive hub networks are points of critical vulnerability in the human causal connectome. These data highlight the central role of attention and executive control networks in the human cortical connectome and set the stage for future applications of data-driven causal connectivity analysis in psychiatry.

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Rawls, E., Kummerfeld, E., Mueller, B. A., Ma, S., Zilverstand, A.. 2021-10-21. Executive and Attentional Resting-State Hubs of the Human Cortical Connectome Revealed by a Causal Discovery Method for Data-Driven Effective Connectivity Analysis. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.20.465211

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