We observe (Fig. \ref{229675}) a positive correlation between the NIHSS assessed on early and late clinical follow-up and the number of rich club nodes affected by the acute infarct (Spearman's Rho \(r_{early}=0.54, p<0.001\), and \(r_{late}=0.58, p=0.001\), respectively).
We further examine the relationship between DWI volume (\(DWI_V\)) and \(N_{RC}\) to assess whether \(N_{RC}\) is determined by infarct size. As can be observed in Fig. \ref{429179}, despite the positive correlation between these two measures (Spearman's Rho \(r=0.46\)), there are both large infarcts that do not affect any rich club regions and small infarcts that involve one or two rich club regions; this result demonstrates that larger \(DWI_V\) does not imply greater \(N_{RC}\).