Bone Fusion in Normal and Pathological Development is Constrained by the Network Architecture of the Human Skull.

ABSTRACT: Craniosynostosis, the premature fusion of cranial bones, affects the correct development of the skull producing morphological malformations in newborns. To assess the susceptibility of each craniofacial articulation to close prematurely, we used a network model of the skull to quantify the link reliability (an index based on stochastic block models and Bayesian inference) of each articulation. We show that, of the 93 human skull articulations at birth, the few articulations that are associated with non-syndromic craniosynostosis conditions have statistically significant lower reliability scores than the others. In a similar way, articulations that close during the normal postnatal development of the skull have also lower reliability scores than those articulations that persist through adul

SUBMITTER: Esteve-Altava B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5469793 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature