Brain structural modules associated to functional high-order interactions in the human brain

The brain’s modular organization, ranging from microcircuits to large-scale networks, has been extensively studied in terms of its structural and functional properties. Particularly insightful has been the investigation of the coupling between structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC), whose analysis has revealed important insights into the brain’s efficiency and adaptability related to various cognitive functions. Interestingly, links in SC are intrinsically pairwise but this is not the case for FC; and while recent work demonstrates the relevance of the brain’s high-order interactions (HOI), the coupling of between SC and functional HOI remains unexplored. To address this gap, this study leverages functional MRI and diffusion weighted imaging to delineate the brain’s modular structure by investigating the coupling between SC and functional HOI. Our results demonstrates that structural networks can be associated with both redundant and synergistic functional interactions. In particular, SC exhibits both positive and negative correlations with redundancy, it shows consistent positive correlations with synergy, indicating that a higher density of structural connections is linked to increased synergistic interactions. These findings advance our understanding of the complex relationship between structural and high-order functional properties, shedding light on the brain’s architecture underlying its modular organization.