The frequent subgraphs of the connectome of the human brain

Abstract

In mapping the human structural connectome, we are in a very fortunate situation: one can compute and compare graphs, describing the cerebral connections between the very same, anatomically identified small regions of the gray matter among hundreds of human subjects. The comparison of these graphs has led to numerous recent results, as the (1) discovery that women’s connectomes have deeper and richer connectivity-related graph parameters like those of men, or (2) the description of more and less conservatively connected lobes and cerebral regions, and (3) the discovery of the phenomenon of the consensus connectome dynamics. Today one of the greatest challenges of brain science is the description and modeling of the circuitry of the human brain. For this goal, we need to identify sub-circuits that are present in almost all human subjects and those, which are much less frequent: the former sub-circuits most probably have functions with general importance, the latter sub-circuits are probably related to the individual variability of the brain structure and function. The present contribution describes the frequent connected subgraphs of at most six edges in the human brain. We analyze these frequent graphs and also examine sex differences in these graphs: we demonstrate numerous connected subgraphs that are more frequent in female or male connectomes. While there is no difference in the number of k edge connected subgraphs in males or females for ${\text{k}} = 1$, and for ${\text{k}} = 2$ males have slightly more frequent subgraphs, for ${\text{k}} = 6$ there is a very strong advantage in the case of female braingraphs. Our data source is the public release of the Human Connectome Project, and we are applying the data of 426 human subjects in this study.