Abstract #5208

The unresolved problem of synaptic connectivity in the context of the cerebro-cerebellar loop

Fulvia Palesi^1,2, Fernando Calamante^3,4, Giovanni Savini^2,5, Egidio D'Angelo^2,6, and Claudia Angela Michela Gandini Wheeler-Kingshott^6,7,8

¹Department of Physics, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, ²Brain Connectivity Center, C. Mondino National Neurological Institute, Pavia, Italy, ³Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, University of Melbourne, Heidelberg, Australia, ⁴Florey Department of Neuroscience and Mental Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, ⁵Department of Physics, University of Milan, Milan, Italy, ⁶Department of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, ⁷Queen Square MS Centre, UCL Institute of Neurology, Faculty of Brain Sciences, University College London, London, United Kingdom, ⁸Brain MRI 3T Research Center, C. Mondino National Neurological Institute, Pavia, Italy

Recently advanced tractography has been used for assessing the feasibility of characterizing cerebro-cerebellar tracts, acknowledging the issue of how tractography deals with polysynaptic connectivity in particular through the thalamus. In this work, four different synaptic connectivity configurations at thalamic level were hypothesized and each one of them was reconstructed using high-quality HCP data. Our findings revealed the key role of thalamic connectivity for characterizing the cerebro-cerebellar connections. We can hypothesize that the relation between streamlines entering/outing the thalamic synapses is multiplicative and our findings using polysynaptc thalamic tracts support the fact that cognitive/associative areas are the mainly involved in the cerebro-cerebellar connections.

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