The functional connectivity derived from functional MRI is also modulated by gender [72]. In this study, we observed sex-related differences in the functional brain networks constructed from functional connectivity in healthy children. The boys showed significantly higher values in the global efficiency (p = 0.027), whereas the girls showed marginally significantly higher values in the clustering coefficient (p = 0.055). A recent study on functional brain networks in young adults showed a gender-by-hemisphere interaction that men had a higher normalized clustering coefficient in the right hemispheric network but a lower clustering coefficient in the left hemispheric network, indicating a finding different from this study, most likely due to the lack of inter-hemisphere connections [11]. However, our results were consistent with a previous study on the structural brain networks constructed from DTI with young adults in which females have higher local efficiencies than males [9]. Thus, we speculated that the functional brain networks in the boys showed a more optimal configuration for globally distributed processing, whereas those in the girls took an advantage of locally specialized processing. Integrated processes (e.g., the
