Gajwani Mehul, Oldham Stuart, Pang James C, Arnatkevičiūtė Aurina, Tiego Jeggan, Bellgrove Mark A, Fornito Alex
The Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, School of Psychological Sciences, and Monash Biomedical Imaging, Monash University, Victoria, Australia.
Developmental Imaging, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, The Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Netw Neurosci. 2023 Dec 22;7(4):1326-1350. doi: 10.1162/netn_a_00324. eCollection 2023.
Recent years have seen a surge in the use of diffusion MRI to map connectomes in humans, paralleled by a similar increase in processing and analysis choices. Yet these different steps and their effects are rarely compared systematically. Here, in a healthy young adult population ( = 294), we characterized the impact of a range of analysis pipelines on one widely studied property of the human connectome: its degree distribution. We evaluated the effects of 40 pipelines (comparing common choices of parcellation, streamline seeding, tractography algorithm, and streamline propagation constraint) and 44 group-representative connectome reconstruction schemes on highly connected hub regions. We found that hub location is highly variable between pipelines. The choice of parcellation has a major influence on hub architecture, and hub connectivity is highly correlated with regional surface area in most of the assessed pipelines ( > 0.70 in 69% of the pipelines), particularly when using weighted networks. Overall, our results demonstrate the need for prudent decision-making when processing diffusion MRI data, and for carefully considering how different processing choices can influence connectome organization.
近年来，扩散磁共振成像（diffusion MRI）在绘制人类连接组方面的应用激增，同时处理和分析方法的选择也相应增加。然而，这些不同步骤及其影响很少得到系统比较。在此，我们以294名健康年轻成人为研究对象，探讨了一系列分析流程对人类连接组一个广泛研究的特性——度分布（degree distribution）的影响。我们评估了40种分析流程（比较了不同的脑区划分、流线种子点设置、纤维束成像算法以及流线传播约束等常见选择）和44种具有群体代表性的连接组重建方案对高度连接的枢纽区域的影响。我们发现，不同流程之间枢纽位置差异很大。脑区划分的选择对枢纽结构有重大影响，并且在大多数评估流程中，枢纽连接性与区域表面积高度相关（69%的流程中相关性大于0.70），在使用加权网络时尤为明显。总体而言，我们的结果表明，在处理扩散磁共振成像数据时需要谨慎决策，并仔细考虑不同的处理选择如何影响连接组的组织结构。
