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. 2025 Jan 27;230(2):35.
doi: 10.1007/s00429-025-02897-6.

rsfMRI-based brain entropy is negatively correlated with gray matter volume and surface area

Gianpaolo Del Mauro  1 , Ze Wang  2
Affiliations

rsfMRI-based brain entropy is negatively correlated with gray matter volume and surface area

Gianpaolo Del Mauro et al. Brain Struct Funct. .

Abstract

The brain entropy (BEN) reflects the randomness of brain activity and is inversely related to its temporal coherence. In recent years, BEN has been found to be associated with a number of neurocognitive, biological, and sociodemographic variables such as fluid intelligence, age, sex, and education. However, evidence regarding the potential relationship between BEN and brain structure is still lacking. In this study, we use resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) data to estimate BEN and investigate its associations with three structural brain metrics: gray matter volume (GMV), surface area (SA), and cortical thickness (CT). We performed separate analyses on BEN maps derived from four distinct rsfMRI runs, and used a voxelwise as well as a regions-of-interest (ROIs) approach. Our findings consistently showed that lower BEN was related to increased GMV and SA in the lateral frontal and temporal lobes, inferior parietal lobules, and precuneus. We hypothesize that lower BEN and higher SA might reflect higher brain reserve as well as increased information processing capacity.

Keywords: Brain entropy; Brain morphology; Cortical thickness; Gray matter volume; Resting-state fMRI; Surface area.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Ethics approval: Data acquisition and sharing have been approved by the HCP parent IRB. This study re-analyzed the HCP data and Data Use Terms were signed and approved by the WU-Minn HCP Consortium. Data re-analysis has been approved by UMB IRB. Consent to participate: Written informed consent forms were obtained from all subjects before any experiments. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

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