Principles of recovery from traumatic brain injury: reorganization of functional networks

Abstract

Recovery after brain injury is an excellent platform to study the mechanism underlying brain plasticity, the reorganization of networks. Do complex network measures capture the physiological and cognitive alterations that occurred after a traumatic brain injury and its recovery? Patients as well as control subjects underwent resting-state MEG recording following injury and after neurorehabilitation. Next, network measures such as network strength, path length, efficiency, clustering and energetic cost were calculated. We show that these parameters restore, in many cases, to control ones after recovery, specifically in delta and alpha bands, and we design a model that gives some hints about how the functional networks modify their weights in the recovery process. Positive correlations between complex network measures and some of the general index of the WAIS-III test were found: changes in delta-based path-length and those in Performance IQ score, and alpha-based normalized global efficiency and Perceptual Organization Index. These results indicate that: 1) the principle of recovery depends on the spectral band, 2) the structure of the functional networks evolves in parallel to brain recovery with correlations with neuropsychological scales, and 3) energetic cost reveals an optimal principle of recovery.