1 research outputs found
Exploring the Human Connectome Topology in Group Studies
Visually comparing brain networks, or connectomes, is an essential task in
the field of neuroscience. Especially relevant to the field of clinical
neuroscience, group studies that examine differences between populations or
changes over time within a population enable neuroscientists to reason about
effective diagnoses and treatments for a range of neuropsychiatric disorders.
In this paper, we specifically explore how visual analytics tools can be used
to facilitate various clinical neuroscience tasks, in which observation and
analysis of meaningful patterns in the connectome can support patient diagnosis
and treatment. We conduct a survey of visualization tasks that enable clinical
neuroscience activities, and further explore how existing connectome
visualization tools support or fail to support these tasks. Based on our
investigation of these tasks, we introduce a novel visualization tool,
NeuroCave, to support group studies analyses. We discuss how our design
decisions (the use of immersive visualization, the use of hierarchical
clustering and dimensionality reduction techniques, and the choice of visual
encodings) are motivated by these tasks. We evaluate NeuroCave through two use
cases that illustrate the utility of interactive connectome visualization in
clinical neuroscience contexts. In the first use case, we study sex differences
using functional connectomes and discover hidden connectome patterns associated
with well-known cognitive differences in spatial and verbal abilities. In the
second use case, we show how the utility of visualizing the brain in different
topological space coupled with clustering information can reveal the brain's
intrinsic structure