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fMRI Brain Networks as Statistical Mechanical Ensembles

In this paper, we apply ensemble methods from statistical physics to analyse fMRI brain networks for Alzheimer's patients. By mapping the nodes in a network to virtual particles in a thermal system, the microcanonical ensemble and the canonical ensemble are analogous to two different fMRI network representations. These representations are obtained by selecting a threshold on the BOLD time series correlations between nodes in different ways. The microcanonical ensemble corresponds to a set of networks with a fixed fraction of edges, while the canonical ensemble corresponds to the set networks with edges obtained with a fixed value of the threshold. In the former case, there is zero variance in the number of edges in each network, while in the latter case the set of networks have a variance in the number of edges. Ensemble methods describe the macroscopic properties of a network by considering the underlying microscopic characterisations which are in turn closely related to the degree configuration and network entropy. Our treatment allows us to specify new partition functions for fMRI brain networks, and to explore a phase transition in the degree distribution. The resulting method turns out to be an effective tool to identify the most salient anatomical brain regions in Alzheimer's disease and provides a tool to distinguish groups of patients in different stages of the disease.