Rich club network analysis shows distinct patterns of disruption in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease

Math Vis. 2014:2014:13-22. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-11182-7_2.

Abstract

Diffusion imaging and brain connectivity analyses can reveal the underlying organizational patterns of the human brain, described as complex networks of densely interlinked regions. Here, we analyzed 1.5-Tesla whole-brain diffusion-weighted images from 64 participants - 15 patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal (bvFTD) dementia, 19 with early-onset Alzheimer's disease (EOAD), and 30 healthy elderly controls. Based on whole-brain tractography, we reconstructed structural brain connectivity networks to map connections between cortical regions. We examined how bvFTD and EOAD disrupt the weighted 'rich club' - a network property where high-degree network nodes are more interconnected than expected by chance. bvFTD disrupts both the nodal and global organization of the network in both low- and high-degree regions of the brain. EOAD targets the global connectivity of the brain, mainly affecting the fiber density of high-degree (highly connected) regions that form the rich club network. These rich club analyses suggest distinct patterns of disruptions among different forms of dementia.