Abstract #0329

Structural and functional connectivity patterns of brainstem nuclei in living humans by 7 Tesla MRI

Subhranil Koley¹, Kavita Singh^1,2, María Guadalupe García-Gomar^1,3, Simone Cauzzo^1,4, Firdaus Fabrice Hannanu¹, and Marta Bianciardi^1,5

¹Brainstem Imaging Laboratory, Department of Radiology, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, United States, ²Multiscale Imaging and Integrative Biophysics Unit, LBN, National Institute on Aging, NIH, Baltimore, MD, United States, ³Escuela Nacional de Estudios Superiores Unidad Juriquilla, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Querétaro, Juriquilla, Mexico, ⁴Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Unit, Center for Rare Neurological Diseases (ERN-RND), Department of Neurosciences, University of Padova, Padova, Italy, ⁵Division of Sleep Medicine, Harvard University, Boston, MA, United States

Synopsis

Keywords: Functional Connectivity, High-Field MRI, Neuro, Structural connectivity, Functional connectivity

Motivation: A definitive baseline connectome of brainstem nuclei is missing.

Goal(s): To improve brainstem hodology in living humans by using the similarity between functional and structural connectomes of brainstem nuclei as ground truth.

Approach: In healthy subjects, we mapped 58 Brainstem Navigator atlas labels to high spatial resolution functional and diffusion-weighted 7 Tesla MRI, and computed their functional and structural connectivity, the latter computed using three probabilistic tractography methods proposed in the literature (seed-, ACT-, ACT-SIFT-based), with 148 cortical and 21 subcortical areas.

Results: ACT-SIFT outperformed the other methods within the brainstem and the cortex by reducing large fiber bias.

Impact: Comparison of structural and functional connectomes achieved with different methodology can improve the understanding and mapping of brainstem nuclei connections in living humans and establish a baseline connectome useful to evaluate a broad set of diseases including movement/sleep disorders.

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