Sketching a Space of Brain States.

Abstract

Brain functional connectivity alterations, that is, pathological changes in the signal exchange between areas of the brain, are occurring in several neurological diseases, including neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric ones. They consist in changes in how brain functional networks work. By conceptualising a brain space as a space whose points are connectome configurations representing brain functional states, changes in brain network functionality can be represented by paths between these points. Paths from a healthy state to a diseased one, or between diseased states as instances of disease progression, are modelled as the action of the Krankheit-Operator, that produces changes from a brain functional state to another one. This study proposes a formal representation of the space of brain states and presents its computational definition. Moreover, references to patients affected by Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer-Perusini's disease are included for discussing the proposed approach and possible developments of the research toward a generalisation.