Rousseau Paul-Noel, Bazin Pierre-Louis, Steele Christopher J
Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
Full brain picture Analytics, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Sci Rep. 2025 May 12;15(1):16399. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-00886-7.
The cerebellum's involvement in a range of cognitive, emotional, and motor processes has become increasingly evident. Given the uniformity of the cerebellar cortex's cellular architecture its contributions to varied processes are thought be partially mediated by its patterns of reciprocal connectivity with the rest of the brain. A better understanding of these connections is therefore fundamental to disentangling the cerebellum's contribution to cognition and behavior. While these connections have been studied extensively in non-human animals using invasive methods, we have limited knowledge of these connections in humans. The current work reconstructed the corticopontine projection, the first segment of downstream connections between the cerebral and cerebellar cortices, with diffusion MRI tractography in human in-vivo whole brain data and an independent higher resolution postmortem brainstem dataset. Dimensionality reduction was used to characterize the pattern of connectivity of cerebral cortical projections to the pons as two overlapping gradients that were consistent across participants and datasets: medial to lateral and core to belt. Our findings align with invasive work done in animals and advance our understanding of this connection in humans - providing valuable context to a growing body of cerebellar research, offering insights into impacts of damage along the pathway, and informing clinical interventions.
小脑在一系列认知、情感和运动过程中的参与作用已愈发明显。鉴于小脑皮质细胞结构的一致性，其对各种过程的贡献被认为部分是由其与大脑其他部分的相互连接模式介导的。因此，更好地理解这些连接对于理清小脑对认知和行为的贡献至关重要。虽然在非人类动物中已使用侵入性方法对这些连接进行了广泛研究，但我们对人类的这些连接了解有限。当前的研究工作利用扩散磁共振成像纤维束成像技术，在人类活体全脑数据和一个独立的高分辨率死后脑干数据集中，重建了大脑和小脑皮质之间下游连接的第一段——皮质脑桥投射。降维分析被用于将大脑皮质投射到脑桥的连接模式表征为两个重叠的梯度，这些梯度在参与者和数据集中是一致的：从内侧到外侧，以及从核心到边缘。我们的研究结果与在动物身上进行的侵入性研究结果一致，并推进了我们对人类这种连接的理解——为越来越多的小脑研究提供了有价值的背景信息，深入了解了该通路损伤的影响，并为临床干预提供了参考。
