The LoCo (Loss in Connectivity) Tool: A New Way to Investigate Changes to the Structural Brain Network in Various Types of Disease or Injury

Amy Kuceyeski¹, Norman Relkin², ³, Ashish Raj¹

There are many tools to assess pathologic brain changes with MRI, but, to our knowledge, the LoCo (Loss in Connection) Tool presented here is the first that associates localized white matter (WM) lesions with disruptions in gray matter connectivity as a step toward understanding the lesions functional implications. This tool uses tractograms (set of WM fibers) from a large set of normal healthy individuals in a common space (MNI) to assess structural local and global network disruption related to a WM lesion mask. We apply this methodology to patients with Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus, and show large amounts of orbital-frontal disruption.