4,040 research outputs found
Pattern Visualization of Human Connectome Data
The human brain is a complex network with countless connected neurons, and can be described as a "connectome". Existing studies on analyzing human connectome data are primarily focused on characterizing the brain networks with a small number of easily computable measures that may be inadequate for revealing complex relationship between brain function and its structural substrate. To facilitate large-scale connectomic analysis, in this paper, we propose a powerful and flexible volume rendering scheme to effectively visualize and interactively explore thousands of network measures in the context of brain anatomy, and to aid pattern discovery. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme by applying it to a real connectome data set
Mapping hybrid functional-structural connectivity traits in the human connectome
One of the crucial questions in neuroscience is how a rich functional
repertoire of brain states relates to its underlying structural organization.
How to study the associations between these structural and functional layers is
an open problem that involves novel conceptual ways of tackling this question.
We here propose an extension of the Connectivity Independent Component Analysis
(connICA) framework, to identify joint structural-functional connectivity
traits. Here, we extend connICA to integrate structural and functional
connectomes by merging them into common hybrid connectivity patterns that
represent the connectivity fingerprint of a subject. We test this extended
approach on the 100 unrelated subjects from the Human Connectome Project. The
method is able to extract main independent structural-functional connectivity
patterns from the entire cohort that are sensitive to the realization of
different tasks. The hybrid connICA extracted two main task-sensitive hybrid
traits. The first, encompassing the within and between connections of dorsal
attentional and visual areas, as well as fronto-parietal circuits. The second,
mainly encompassing the connectivity between visual, attentional, DMN and
subcortical networks. Overall, these findings confirms the potential ofthe
hybrid connICA for the compression of structural/functional connectomes into
integrated patterns from a set of individual brain networks.Comment: article: 34 pages, 4 figures; supplementary material: 5 pages, 5
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Disambiguating the role of blood flow and global signal with partial information decomposition
Global signal (GS) is an ubiquitous construct in resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), associated to nuisance, but containing by definition most of the neuronal signal. Global signal regression (GSR) effectively removes the impact of physiological noise and other artifacts, but at the same time it alters correlational patterns in unpredicted ways. Performing GSR taking into account the underlying physiology (mainly the blood arrival time) has been proven to be beneficial. From these observations we aimed to: 1) characterize the effect of GSR on network-level functional connectivity in a large dataset; 2) assess the complementary role of global signal and vessels; and 3) use the framework of partial information decomposition to further look into the joint dynamics of the global signal and vessels, and their respective influence on the dynamics of cortical areas. We observe that GSR affects intrinsic connectivity networks in the connectome in a non-uniform way. Furthermore, by estimating the predictive information of blood flow and the global signal using partial information decomposition, we observe that both signals are present in different amounts across intrinsic connectivity networks. Simulations showed that differences in blood arrival time can largely explain this phenomenon, while using hemodynamic and calcium mouse recordings we were able to confirm the presence of vascular effects, as calcium recordings lack hemodynamic information. With these results we confirm network-specific effects of GSR and the importance of taking blood flow into account for improving de-noising methods. Additionally, and beyond the mere issue of data denoising, we quantify the diverse and complementary effect of global and vessel BOLD signals on the dynamics of cortical areas
Annotating Synapses in Large EM Datasets
Reconstructing neuronal circuits at the level of synapses is a central
problem in neuroscience and becoming a focus of the emerging field of
connectomics. To date, electron microscopy (EM) is the most proven technique
for identifying and quantifying synaptic connections. As advances in EM make
acquiring larger datasets possible, subsequent manual synapse identification
({\em i.e.}, proofreading) for deciphering a connectome becomes a major time
bottleneck. Here we introduce a large-scale, high-throughput, and
semi-automated methodology to efficiently identify synapses. We successfully
applied our methodology to the Drosophila medulla optic lobe, annotating many
more synapses than previous connectome efforts. Our approaches are extensible
and will make the often complicated process of synapse identification
accessible to a wider-community of potential proofreaders
Decoupling of brain function from structure reveals regional behavioral specialization in humans
The brain is an assembly of neuronal populations interconnected by structural
pathways. Brain activity is expressed on and constrained by this substrate.
Therefore, statistical dependencies between functional signals in directly
connected areas can be expected higher. However, the degree to which brain
function is bound by the underlying wiring diagram remains a complex question
that has been only partially answered. Here, we introduce the
structural-decoupling index to quantify the coupling strength between structure
and function, and we reveal a macroscale gradient from brain regions more
strongly coupled, to regions more strongly decoupled, than expected by
realistic surrogate data. This gradient spans behavioral domains from
lower-level sensory function to high-level cognitive ones and shows for the
first time that the strength of structure-function coupling is spatially
varying in line with evidence derived from other modalities, such as functional
connectivity, gene expression, microstructural properties and temporal
hierarchy
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