Agreement between functional connectivity and cortical thickness-driven correlation maps of the medial frontal cortex.
Parcellation of the human cortex has important implications in neuroscience. Parcellation is often a crucial requirement before meaningful regional analysis can occur. The human cortex can be parcellated into distinct regions based on structural features, such as gyri and sulci. Brain network patterns in a given region with respect to its neighbors, known as connectional fingerprints, can be used to parcellate the cortex. Distinct imaging modalities might provide complementary information for brain parcellation. Here, we established functional connectivity with time series data from functional MRI (fMRI) combined with a correlation map of cortical thickness obtained from T1-weighted MRI. We aimed to extend the previous study, which parcellated the medial frontal cortex (MFC) using functional connectivity, and to test the value of additional information regarding cortical thickness. Two types of network information were used to parcellate the MFC into two sub-regions with spectral and Ward's clustering approaches. The MFC region was defined using manual delineation based on in-house data (n = 12). Parcellation was applied to independent large-scale data obtained from the Human Connectome Project (HCP, n = 248). Agreement between parcellation using fMRI- and thickness-driven connectivity yielded dice coefficient overlaps of 0.74 (Ward's clustering) and 0.54 (spectral clustering). We also explored whole brain connectivity using the MFC sub-regions as seed regions based on these two types of information. The results of whole brain connectivity analyses were also consistent for both types of information. We observed that an inter-regional correlation map derived from cortical thickness strongly reflected the underlying functional connectivity of MFC region.
School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea.|Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research, Institute for Basic Science, Suwon, Korea.
Hyunjin
H
Park
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea.
Yeong-Hun
YH
Park
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea.
Jungho
J
Cha
Department of Neurology, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, Korea.
Sang Won
SW
Seo
Department of Neurology, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, Korea.
Duk L
DL
Na
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea.
Jong-Min
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3598-376X
JM
Lee
D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D063132:Connectome / Q000379:methods; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult