Heritability of nested hierarchical structural brain network.

When a brain network is constructed by an existing parcellation method, the topological structure of the network changes depending on the scale of the parcellation. To avoid the scale dependency, we propose to construct a nested hierarchical structural brain network by subdividing the existing parcellation hierarchically. The method is applied in diffusion tensor imaging study of 111 twins in characterizing the topology of the brain network. The genetic contribution of the whole brain structural connectivity is determined and shown to be robustly present over different network scales.