Abstract #0569

Whole-brain vascular connectome: a new approach to investigate the functional brain networks using large-scale angioarchitecture

Michael Bernier^1,2, Jingyuan E Chen^1,2, Olivia Viessmann^1,2, Nina E Fultz^1,3, Maxime Chamberland⁴, Rebecca K Leaf⁵, Lawrence L Wald^1,2,6, and Jonathan R Polimeni^1,2,6

¹Department of Radiology, A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States, ²Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, ³Department of Engineering, University of Boston, Boston, MA, United States, ⁴Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), Cardiff, United Kingdom, ⁵Division of Hematology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States, ⁶Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, MA, United States

Blood vessels influence nearby fMRI signals, and patterns of vascular anatomy partly shape the patterns of the BOLD response. To better understand the relationship between large-scale brain networks and vascular anatomy, here we developed an approach for estimating the topology of the vascular network and quantifying how vessel pathways connect between brain regions. We used a blood-pool contrast agent to enhance the vessels, and developed a new method for vessel tracking similar to what is conventionally used to estimate structural connectivity in diffusion MRI. We demonstrate an application this framework by estimating vascular connectivity matrices for the human brain.

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