Department of Neurology, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Biomedical Imaging Research Institute (BIRI), Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, 90048, USA.
Commun Biol. 2024 Nov 9;7(1):1477. doi: 10.1038/s42003-024-07160-y.
The brain's white matter connections are thought to provide the structural basis for its functional connections between distant brain regions but how our brain selects the best structural routes for functional communications remains poorly understood. In this study, we propose a Unified Structural and Functional Connectivity (USFC) model and use an "economical assumption" to create the brain's first "traffic map" reflecting how frequently each segment of the brain structural connection is used to achieve the global functional communication system. The resulting USFC map highlights regions in the subcortical, default-mode, and salience networks as the most heavily traversed nodes and a midline frontal-caudate-thalamus-posterior cingulate-visual cortex corridor as the backbone of the whole brain connectivity system. Our results further revealed a striking negative association between structural and functional connectivity strengths in routes supporting negative functional connections, as well as significantly higher efficiency metrics and better predictive performance for cognition in the USFC connectome when compared to structural and functional ones alone. Overall, the proposed USFC model opens up a new window for integrated brain connectome modeling and provides a major leap forward in brain mapping efforts for a better understanding of the brain's fundamental communication mechanisms.
大脑的白质连接被认为为其远距离脑区之间的功能连接提供了结构基础，但我们的大脑如何选择最佳的结构路径来实现功能通信仍知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们提出了一个统一的结构和功能连接（USFC）模型，并采用“经济假设”来创建大脑的第一个“交通图”，反映大脑结构连接的每个片段被用于实现全局功能通信系统的频率。生成的 USFC 图突出了皮质下、默认模式和突显网络中的区域作为最常经过的节点，以及中线额-尾状核-丘脑-后扣带回-视觉皮层走廊作为整个大脑连接系统的骨干。我们的结果进一步揭示了支持负功能连接的路径中结构连接和功能连接强度之间的显著负相关，以及与单独的结构和功能连接相比，在 USFC 连接组中认知的效率指标更高，预测性能更好。总体而言，所提出的 USFC 模型为整合脑连接组学建模开辟了一个新的窗口，并为大脑映射工作提供了一个重大进展，以更好地理解大脑的基本通信机制。
