Decreased dynamism of overlapping brain sub-networks in Major Depressive Disorder

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is increasingly recognized as a common brain disorder with aberrant brain networks. Alterations in dynamic functional brain networks have been widely reported in MDD. However, previous studies mainly focused on detecting non-overlapping sub-networks/communities, neglecting the possibility that one brain region may belong to multiple sub-networks/communities. In the present work, we utilized tensor decomposition method to detect overlapping communities and study the dynamism of overlapping sub-networks through 58 patients with MDD and 63 age- and sex-matched healthy controls (HC). The strength vectors of communities were calculated and two-sample t-test was performed to investigate the statistical significance of the differences in dynamism of MDD and HC groups. We found that communities detected in two groups were pairwise region-matching but overlapped brain regions were almost totally different. We considered two region-matching communities in the two groups as a sub-network. Compared to HCs, MDD patients showed significantly decreased dynamism in five sub-networks which could be functionally mapped to Visual Network (VN), Default Mode Network (DMN), Cognitive Control Network (CCN), Bilateral Limbic Network (BLN) and Auditory Network (AN). The results showed that MDD might only have a marginal effect on the holistic detection of communities and the changes of overlapped brain regions in MDD patients might be put down to the alteration of hubs. Further statistical analysis on nine sub-networks showed decreased dynamism of five sub-networks in MDD patients, which might help us achieve a better understanding of mechanism in MDD.