Assessing Functional Brain Network Dynamics in Dyslexia From fNIRS Data

Abstract

Developmental dyslexia is characterized by a deficit of phonological awareness whose origin is related to atypical neural processing of speech streams. This can lead to differences in the neural networks that encode audio information for dyslexics. In this work, we investigate whether there exist such differences using fNIRS and complex network analysis. We have explored functional brain networks derived from the low-level auditory processing of non-speech stimuli related to speech units such as stress, syllables or phonemes of skilled and dyslexic seven-year-old readers. A complex network analysis was performed to examine the properties of functional brain networks and their temporal evolution. We characterized aspects of brain connectivity such as functional segregation, functional integration or small-worldness. These properties are used as features to extract differential patterns in controls and dyslexic subjects. The results corroborate the presence of topological organizations discrepancies of functional brain networks and their dynamics that differentiate between controls and dyslexic subjects, reaching an AUC up to 0.89 in classification experiments