Validation of DTI Measures of Primary Motor Area Cortical Connectivity

Yurui Gao¹, Ann S. Choe², Xia Li³, Iwona Stepniewska⁴, Adam Anderson

Since DTI tractography is used to examine the neural connectivity between specialized cortical regions of the brain, it is important to evaluate the agreement between the connectivity derived from DTI tractography and corresponding histological information. We reconstruct the projection regions connecting to the primary motor cortex (M1) of the squirrel monkey, based on histological segmentation and compare these regions with the locations of the terminals of DTI fibers penetrating the same M1 region. Quantitative comparison shows an approximate agreement but also limits of applying DTI tractography to predict M1 connectivity.