  The premature fusion of cranial bones, craniosynostosis, 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 modeling and Bayesian
inference) of each articulation. We show that, of the 93 human skull
articulations at birth, the few articulations that are associated with
nonsyndromic 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 adult live.
These results indicate a relationship between the architecture of the skull
network and the specific articulations that close during normal development and
in pathological conditions. Our findings suggest that the topological
arrangement of skull bones might act as an epigenetic factor, predisposing some
articulations to closure, both in normal and pathological development, and also
affecting the long-term evolution of the skull.
