A Traffic Analysis Perspective on Communication in the Brain

In this short paper, we report on an approach to datamine the brain from a novel perspective, namely traffic analysis. Our datamining approach considers the brain regions and the tracts that connect them as a road network, and the signals traveling between them as vehicles. We analyze travel patterns by a process called traffic assignment. The results are unexpected in the sense that the movement of signals in the brain seems to follow some global optimization patterns as opposed to the anarchical system that would be favored by evolution.

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