This is a small world, but not small everywhere: Diverse Community Structures in the FlyBrain Network

Chi-Tin Shih^1,2*

¹Department of Applied Physics, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan
²Brain Research Center, National Tsing-Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

* Presenter:Chi-Tin Shih, email:ctshih@thu.edu.tw

The structure of the brain network of Drosophila was analyzed at the mesoscopic and microscopic scales -- networks describing the connections of the brain regions called local processing units (LPUs), and the single neurons, respectively. The brain network can be organized by some functional modules, or sub-networks, related to the brain functions. The whole-brain showed clear small-world features as many complex networks observed in natural and social sciences. Interestingly, structure of the sub-networks are diverse. Some of them are also small-worlds as the whole brain network, and others are not because they have long path lengths or small clustering coefficients. Statistics of other measurements also show diverse behavior among the sub-networks of the functional modules. The results suggest a correlation between functions and network structures.

Keywords: brain network, small-world network, connectomic analysis