Feng Shi1, Li
Wang1, Ziwen Peng1, 2, Chong-Yaw Wee1,
Dinggang Shen1
1Department
of Radiology and BRIC, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel
Hill, NC, United States; 2Department of Psychology, South China
Normal University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China
Previous studies suggest autism has atypical brain connectivity patterns. In this study, we introduce human brain connectome techniques to investigate the autistic brain in a network level. A total of 49 autistic children and 51 typically developed controls were selected from NDAR. We constructed the brain connectome analysis using 68 cortical regions as nodes and their inter-regional cortical thickness correlations as edges. Results show that autism has more weights of connections for the regions with self-related functions. Increase within frontal lobe and the decrease in frontal-related connections were found, which may contribute to the re-organization of autistic brain.