Analysis of multilayer brain connectivity in Alzheimer’s disease

The brain is a complex network that relies on the interaction between its various regions, known as the connectome. The organization of the human connectome has been studied on different imaging modalities using a single network approach. Here, we integrate the networks obtained from amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data into multilayer networks using BRAPH 2.0 (BRain Analysis using graPH theory, http://braph.org/) and compare these networks between patients with Alzheimer’s Disease and controls. Multilayer modularity, multi-participation coefficient, and multilayer motifs are calculated, and group comparisons are carried out using permutation testing. The study of multilayer brain networks is a promising new field that can potentially provide new insights into the interaction between anatomical, functional and metabolic brain connectivity.