Adolescent maturation of cortical excitation-inhibition balance based on individualized biophysical network modeling

Abstract

The balance of excitation and inhibition is a key functional property of cortical microcircuits which changes through the lifespan. Adolescence is considered a crucial period for the maturation of excitation-inhibition balance. This has been primarily observed in animal studies, yet human in vivo evidence on adolescent maturation of the excitation-inhibition balance at the individual level is limited. Here, we developed an individualized in vivo marker of regional excitation-inhibition balance in human adolescents, estimated using large-scale simulations of biophysical network models fitted to resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from two independent cross-sectional (N = 752) and longitudinal (N = 149) cohorts. We found a widespread relative increase of inhibition in association cortices paralleled by a relative age-related increase of excitation, or lack of change, in sensorimotor areas across both datasets. This developmental pattern co-aligned with multiscale markers of sensorimotor-association differentiation. The spatial pattern of excitation-inhibition development in adolescence was robust to inter-individual variability of structural connectomes and modeling configurations. Notably, we found that alternative simulation-based markers of excitation-inhibition balance show a variable sensitivity to maturational change. Taken together, our study highlights an increase of inhibition during adolescence in association areas using cross sectional and longitudinal data, and provides a robust computational framework to estimate microcircuit maturation in vivo at the individual level.