Department of Computational Neuroscience, University Medical Center Eppendorf, Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2020 Apr 1;41(5):1167-1180. doi: 10.1002/hbm.24866. Epub 2019 Nov 19.
One of the fundamental questions in neuroscience is how brain structure and function are intertwined. MRI-based studies have demonstrated a close relationship between the physical wiring of the brain (structural connectivity) and the associated patterns of synchronization (functional connectivity). However, little is known about the spatial consistency of such a relationship and notably its potential dependence on brain parcellations. In the present study, we performed a comparison of a set of state-of-the-art group-wise brain atlases, with various spatial resolutions, to relate structural and functional connectivity derived from high quality MRI data. We aim to investigate if the definition of brain areas influences the relationship between structural and functional connectivity. We observed that there is a significant effect of brain parcellations, which is mainly driven by the number of areas; there are mixed differences in the SC-FC relationship when compared to purely random parcellations; the influence of the number of areas cannot be attributed solely to the reliability of the connectivity estimates; and beyond the influence of the number of regions, the spatial embedding of the brain (distance effect) can explain a large portion of the observed relationship. As such the choice of a brain parcellation for connectivity analyses remains most likely a matter of convenience.
神经科学的基本问题之一是大脑结构和功能是如何交织在一起的。基于 MRI 的研究表明，大脑的物理布线（结构连接）与相关的同步模式（功能连接）之间存在密切关系。然而，人们对这种关系的空间一致性知之甚少，特别是其潜在的对大脑分割的依赖性。在本研究中，我们比较了一组具有不同空间分辨率的最先进的组级大脑图谱，以将来自高质量 MRI 数据的结构和功能连接相关联。我们旨在研究大脑区域的定义是否会影响结构和功能连接之间的关系。我们观察到大脑分割有显著的影响，主要是由区域数量驱动的；与纯随机分割相比，在结构-功能连接关系上存在混合差异；区域数量的影响不能仅仅归因于连接估计的可靠性；除了区域数量的影响之外，大脑的空间嵌入（距离效应）可以解释观察到的关系的很大一部分。因此，对于连接分析，大脑分割的选择很可能主要是便利性的问题。
