Mining Correlation between Fluid Intelligence and Whole-brain Large Scale Structural Connectivity

Exploring the neural basis of intelligence and the corresponding associations with brain network has been an active area of research in network neuroscience. Up to now, the majority of explorations mining human intelligence in brain connectomics leverages whole-brain functional connectivity patterns. In this study, structural connectivity patterns are instead used to explore relationships between brain connectivity and different behavioral/cognitive measures such as fluid intelligence. Specifically, we conduct a study using the 397 unrelated subjects from Human Connectome Project (Young Adults) dataset to estimate individual level structural connectivity matrices. We show that topological features, as quantified by our proposed measurements: Average Persistence (AP) and Persistent Entropy (PE), has statistically significant associations with different behavioral/cognitive measures. We also perform a parallel study using traditional graph-theoretical measures, provided by Brain Connectivity Toolbox, as benchmarks for our study. Our findings indicate that individual's structural connectivity indeed offers reliable predictive power of different behavioral/cognitive measures, including but not limited to fluid intelligence. Our results suggest that structural connectomes provide complementary insights (compared to using functional connectomes) in predicting human intelligence and warrants future studies on human intelligence and/or other behavioral/cognitive measures involving multi-modal approach.