Coevolutionary balance of resting-state brain networks in autism

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with atypical large-scale brain organization, yet the functional principles underlying these alterations remain incompletely understood. We examined whether coevolutionary balance, a network-level energy measure derived from signed interactions and nodal activity states, captures disruptions in resting-state functional connectivity in autistic adults. Using resting-state fMRI data from ABIDE I with ComBat harmonization to mitigate multi-site batch effects, we constructed whole-brain networks by combining binarized fALFF activity with signed functional correlations and quantified their coevolutionary energy. In the primary analysis with global signal regression (GSR), the ASD group showed significantly more negative global coevolutionary energy (pFDR<0.002), higher proportions of agreement links, and lower proportions of imbalanced-same links, indicating a systematic redistribution of local motifs rather than a uniform increase in balance. Because GSR can introduce artifactual negative correlations, we repeated all analyses without GSR. In this sensitivity analysis, whole-brain energy and motif differences were attenuated, but bipolarity, a measure of global two-block signed network organization, became the only FDR-significant metric (pFDR = 0.047), with ASD showing higher bipolarity. Intra-network energy differences did not survive FDR correction under either pipeline. Coevolutionary energy showed modest associations with ADI-R and ADOS scores, none of which survived correction across 720 tests. Machine learning classification achieved 77.8% test accuracy (AUC = 0.79) with GSR and 64.7% (AUC = 0.65) without GSR. These findings suggest that coevolutionary balance captures altered signed network organization in ASD, though the specific metric driving group differences depends on preprocessing choices regarding global signal regression.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Unknown venue

• Publication date

  2025-07-11

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Physics

• Identifiers
  arXiv 2507.09045
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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