Negative correlations in large-scale functional brain networks reveal an 'anti-rich club' which is disrupted in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Emma Towlson

Advances in neuroimaging and network neuroscience allow us to frame various brain disorders and diseases as dysconnectivity problems. The healthy human brain is known to exhibit organizational features including rich clubs – sets of densely connected hub nodes that are thought to efficiently facilitate global integration and local segregation of information flow. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a prevalent developmental disability that causes serious social and communication difficulties. It is thought to affect brain connectivity, though our understanding of how is incomplete and it remains a challenge to link network changes to behavioural measures at the level of the individual. In this talk, I will present our recent results on the rich club in functional brain networks in children less than ten years of age. We find that hub nodes can be partitioned those with positive local connections and those with negative connections that span modules. The positively connected hubs form a tightly connected rich club, as expected, yet the negatively connected hubs avoid each other, forming an “anti-rich club”. We are able to demonstrate that the prominence of the anti-rich club is altered in ASD, and can be related to symptom burden. These findings have implications for our understanding of the role of inhibition between networks in the brain in ASD, and for the ability of network neuroscience to contribute to precision medicine.

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