Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
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Thesis defense Ronald Janssen (Donders series 310)

8 February 2018

Promotor: prof. dr. R. Kessels, Copromotor: dr. M. van Gerven

Connecting the dots and dotting the connections: novel methods to improve sensitivity of graph-theoretical statistics in neuroscience.

Graph theory is a useful tool for analysing the architecture of neural connectivity. However, its use relies on an appropriate translation from recorded data to graph form. This translation depends on properly defining the connections between dots in the graph, but also the dots between connections. This thesis describes several methods to produce these graph elements. These methods were developed in a Bayesian framework, which allows for a propagation and characterisation of uncertainty all the way to the statistics used to summarise graphs. These methods are able to find more structure in the data than previous approaches. We found that graphs produced with this approach were more closely related to cognitive performance in patients with cerebral small-vessel disease.