Small-world structures are often used to describe structural connections in the brain. In this work, we compare the structural connection of cortical areas of a healthy brain and a brain affected by Alzheimer's disease with artificial small-world networks. Based on statistics analysis, we demonstrate that similar small-world networks can be constructed using Newman-Watts procedure. The network quantifiers of both structural matrices are identified inside the probabilistic valley. Despite of similarities between structural connection matrices and sampled small-world networks, increased assortativity can be found in the Alzheimer brain. Our results indicate that network quantifiers can be helpful to identify abnormalities in real structural connection matrices.
@article{arxiv.1905.11249,
title = {Network properties of healthy and Alzheimer's brains},
author = {José C. P. Coninck and Fabiano A. S. Ferrari and Adriane S. Reis and Kelly C. Iarosz and Antonio M. Batista and Ricardo L. Viana},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.11249},
year = {2020}
}