Altered topological structure of the brain white matter in maltreated children through topological data analysis

Moo K Chung; Tahmineh Azizi; Jamie L Hanson; Andrew L Alexander; Seth D Pollak; Richard J Davidson

doi:10.1162/netn_a_00355

Altered topological structure of the brain white matter in maltreated children through topological data analysis

Netw Neurosci. 2024 Apr 1;8(1):355-376. doi: 10.1162/netn_a_00355. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Moo K Chung¹, Tahmineh Azizi¹, Jamie L Hanson², Andrew L Alexander³, Seth D Pollak⁴, Richard J Davidson⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA.
² Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
³ Department of Medical Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA.
⁴ Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA.

Abstract

Childhood maltreatment may adversely affect brain development and consequently influence behavioral, emotional, and psychological patterns during adulthood. In this study, we propose an analytical pipeline for modeling the altered topological structure of brain white matter in maltreated and typically developing children. We perform topological data analysis (TDA) to assess the alteration in the global topology of the brain white matter structural covariance network among children. We use persistent homology, an algebraic technique in TDA, to analyze topological features in the brain covariance networks constructed from structural magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging. We develop a novel framework for statistical inference based on the Wasserstein distance to assess the significance of the observed topological differences. Using these methods in comparing maltreated children with a typically developing control group, we find that maltreatment may increase homogeneity in white matter structures and thus induce higher correlations in the structural covariance; this is reflected in the topological profile. Our findings strongly suggest that TDA can be a valuable framework to model altered topological structures of the brain. The MATLAB codes and processed data used in this study can be found at https://github.com/laplcebeltrami/maltreated.

Keywords: Maltreated children; Persistent homology; Structural covariance networks; Topological data analysis.

Plain language summary

We employ topological data analysis (TDA) to investigate altered topological structures in the white matter of children who have experienced maltreatment. Persistent homology in TDA is utilized to quantify topological differences between typically developing children and those subjected to maltreatment, using magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging data. The Wasserstein distance is computed between topological features to assess disparities in brain networks. Our findings demonstrate that persistent homology effectively characterizes the altered dynamics of white matter in children who have suffered maltreatment.

Abstract

Plain language summary

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