Year: 2013
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The functional connectivity between brain regions during swallowing is still not well understood. Understanding these complex interactions is of a great interest from scientific and clinical perspectives. In this study, we utilize functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate brain functional networks during voluntary saliva swallowing in twenty two adult healthy subjects (all females, 23.1 ± 1.52 years of age). To construct these functional connections, we compute mean partial correlation matrices over ninety brain regions for each participant. Two regions are considered functionally connected if they showed statistically significant correlations. These correlation matrices are then analyzed using graph-theoretical approaches. In particular, we consider several network measures for the whole brain and swallowing-related brain regions. The results have shown that significant pairwise functional connections are mostly either local and intra-hemispheric or symmetrically inter-hemispheric. Furthermore, we have shown that the human brain functional network had robust small-world properties, which support efficient parallel information transfer at a relatively low cost. Swallowing related brain regions also had higher values for some of the network measures in comparison when these measures were calculated for the whole brain. Our results have demonstrated the basic network properties of the human brain compatible with previous functional network studies, but also showed unique connections in some regions during swallowing. This leads us to believe that graph-theoretical approaches are a valid tool for the analysis of the swallowing functional connectivity.
Author: Bo Luan
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W178715598