Integrated analysis and visualization of group differences in structural and functional brain connectivity: applications in typical ageing and schizophrenia

Structural and functional brain connectivity are increasingly used to identify and analyze group differences in studies of brain disease. This study presents methods to analyze uni- and bi-modal brain connectivity and evaluate their ability to identify differences. Novel visualizations of significantly different connections comparing multiple metrics are presented. On the global level, “bi-modal comparison plots” show the distribution of uni- and bi-modal group differences and the relationship between structure and function. Differences between brain lobes are visualized using “worm plots”. Group differences in connections are examined with an existing visualization, the “connectogram”. These visualizations were evaluated in two proof-of-concept studies: (1) middle-aged versus elderly subjects; and (2) patients with schizophrenia versus controls. Each included two measures derived from diffusion weighted images and two from functional magnetic resonance images. The structural measures w...