Fig. 5

a Time evolution for the measure of Von Frey test superimposed to the LCP-corr. LCP-corr shows a high correlation (Pearson = 0.91, Spearman = 0.95) with the Von Frey test, suggesting that the behavioral response to pain during consecutive time points is in high correspondence with the changes of LCP-corr in the functional connectome of the rat brain. Since the curves have been stretched in order to fit in the subplot and this could misleadingly suggest a linear trend, a scale-invariant plot is provided for clarity in Additional file 1: Figure S2 (b) The plot highlights how the number of connections changes in time between S1 and VPL (black, inter regional), within S1 (blue, intra-regional) and within VPL (Ochre, intra-regional). The main variation of LCP-corr is between 4 and 11 days whereas is more stable before 4 days and after 11 days. This increase of the measure implies that significant modifications of the connectivity are occurring at the local community level. This is evident from the higher variability in the number of intra-regional links in the same interval, between 4 and 11 days. In comparison, the number of inter-regional connections between S1 and VPL is more stable, suggesting that the chronic pain produces more activity at local scale rather than global scale. c Representation of the brain network at two time points: 9 days and 11 days. The number of intra S1 links (blue) increased whereas the intra VPL links (ochre) decreased from 9 to 11 days. Instead, the number of links between S1-VPL remained almost the same