Abstract #3432

Increased Cost Efficiency of Economical Brain Structural Networks in the Early Developing Brain

Yong Fan¹, Feng Shi¹, John Gilmore², Weili Lin¹, Dinggang Shen¹

¹Department of Radiology and BRIC, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA; ²Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Brain networks are the graph representation of brain regional connectivity, often exhibiting so called small-world network properties. The small world characteristics of brain networks might be the evolutionary result of brain development. To test this hypothesis, brain structural networks were built from longitudinal MRI data of healthy pediatric subjects from 2 weeks to 2 years of age. As a function of cost, the global and local efficiency of information processing were measured. The findings suggest that the brain structural networks are economical, and their cost efficiency increases steadily and significantly with the brain development from 2 weeks to 2 years.