Complex Brain Networks in Health, Development and Disease

We are all familiar with complex networks: How does a computer virus spread around the internet? How does a contagious disease get passed around a popluation? How does a rumour spread through a workforce? It has been found that common patterns of connectivity tend to arise in lots of different types of network. Computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians have developed techniques to analyse, categorise and explain these patterns. Very recent brain scanning technology allows us to look at networks within the living human brain: Which parts of the brain are connected to which other parts? This project will apply the tools of network analysis to this new experimental data. It will allow us to address fundamental questions such as: How is the human brain wired up?, and What makes the human brain different from that of other primates? Also, by comparing brain scans from healthy and diseased patients, we can look at issues such as: What goes wrong with the wiring in patients with Alzheimer s disease or Multiple Sclerosis or schizophrenia?, and What type of medical intervntion is likely to be useful?

The project team
involves neuroscientists, computer scientists and mathematicians and has access
to cutting edge brain scan data from the
Centre for Functional Magnetic Imaging of the Brain at the
University of Oxford
and John Radcliffe Hospital.

Modern non-invasive experimental neuroscience techniques can now make avialable data that begins to describe the intricate multi-scale connectivity patterns in the human brain. This proposal will apply tools of complex network analysis that have emerged in computer science, physics and mathematics to this new data source. This will allow us to characterise and measure global properties, explain network evolution, find and interpret network motifs and predict global behaviour from individual components. Results will contribute both to basic biological and medical science and to the study of brain development, ageing evolution and disorders. This interdiscliplinary project will extend an existing successful collaboration between neuroscientists, computational scientists and mathematicians. Access to cutting edge, whole-brain diffusion data from the FMRIB centre at Oxford adds enormous value to this paoposal.