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Abstract #1561

Is removal of weak connections necessary for dense weighted structural connectomes?

Oren Civier1, Robert Elton Smith1,2, Chun-Hung Yeh1, Alan Connelly1,2, and Fernando Calamante1,2

1Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Melbourne, Australia, 2Florey Department of Neuroscience and Mental Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

Recent advances in tractography enable the generation of weighted structural connectomes where connection strengths are biologically meaningful. However, use of probabilistic tracking algorithms leads to dense graphs with many low-strength connections, many of which may be considered erroneous. Historically, the existence of such false positives necessitated thresholding of weak connections; this was especially relevant when constructing binary connectomes. Here we show that in dense weighted structural connectomes, the contribution of weak connections to network metrics is negligible and, thus, their removal is not necessary; indeed, the confounds introduced by an arbitrary cut-off value may in fact render this process undesirable.

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