Graph propagation network captures individual specificity of the relationship between functional and structural connectivity

Abstract

Functional connectivity (FC) network characterizes the functional interactions between brain regions and is considered to root in the underlying structural connectivity (SC) network. If this is the case, individual variations in SC should cause corresponding individual variations in FC. However, divergences exist in the correspondence between direct SC and FC and researchers still cannot capture individual differences in FC via direct SC. As brain regions may interact through multi-hop indirect SC pathways, we conceived that one can capture the individual specific SC–FC relationship via incorporating indirect SC pathways appropriately. In this study, we designed graph propagation network (GPN) that models the information propagation between brain regions based on the SC network. Effects of interactions through multi-hop SC pathways naturally emerge from the multilayer information propagation in GPN. We predicted the individual differences in FC network based on SC network via multilayer GPN and results indicate that multilayer GPN incorporating effects of multi-hop indirect SCs greatly enhances the ability to predict individual FC network. Furthermore, the SC–FC relationship evaluated via the prediction accuracy is negatively correlated with the functional gradient, suggesting that the SC–FC relationship gradually uncouples along the functional hierarchy spanning from unimodal to transmodal cortex. We also revealed important intermediate brain regions along multi-hop SC pathways involving in the individual SC–FC relationship. These results suggest that multilayer GPN can serve as a method to establish individual SC–FC relationship at the macroneuroimaging level.