Community structure and modularity in networks of correlated brain activity

Functional connectivity patterns derived from neuroimaging data may be represented as graphs or networks, with individual image voxels or anatomically-defined structures representing the nodes, and a measure of correlation between the responses in each pair of nodes determining the edges. This explicit network representation allows network-analysis approaches to be applied to the characterization of functional connections within the brain. Much recent research in complex networks has focused on methods to identify community structure, i.e. cohesive clusters of strongly interconnected nodes. One class of such algorithms determines a partition of a network into 'sub-networks' based on the optimization of a modularity parameter, thus also providing a measure of the degree of segregation versus integration in the full network. Here, we demonstrate that a community structure algorithm based on the maximization of modularity, applied to a functional connectivity network calculated from the responses to acute fluoxetine challenge in the rat, can identify communities whose distributions correspond to anatomically meaningful structures and include compelling functional subdivisions in the brain. We also discuss the biological interpretation of the modularity parameter in terms of segregation and integration of brain function.