Abstract

Background: The brain networks can provide us an effective way to analyze brain function and brain disease detection. In brain networks, there exist some import neural unit modules, which contain meaningful biological insights.

Objective: Therefore, we need to find the optimal neural unit modules effectively and efficiently.

Method: In this study, we propose a novel algorithm to find community modules of brain networks by combining Neighbor Index and Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO) with dynamic crossover, abbreviated as NIDPSO. The differences between this study and the existing ones lie in that NIDPSO is proposed first to find community modules of brain networks, and dose not need to predefine and preestimate the number of communities in advance.

Results: We generate a neighbor index table to alleviate and eliminate ineffective searches and design a novel coding by which we can determine the community without computing the distances amongst vertices in brain networks. Furthermore, dynamic crossover and mutation operators are designed to modify NIDPSO so as to alleviate the drawback of premature convergence in DPSO.

Conclusion: The numerical results performing on several resting-state functional MRI brain networks demonstrate that NIDPSO outperforms or is comparable with other competing methods in terms of modularity, coverage and conductance metrics.

Keywords: Brain networks, community detection, modularity, discrete particle swarm optimization, dynamic crossover, dynamic mutation.