The relationship between spatial configuration and functional connectivity of brain regions
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- Washington University in St. Louis, United States
- King's College London, United Kingdom
- Radboud University Medical Centre, Netherlands
Abstract
Brain connectivity is often considered in terms of the communication between functionally distinct brain regions. Many studies have investigated the extent to which patterns of coupling strength between multiple neural populations relates to behaviour. For example, studies have used 'functional connectivity fingerprints' to characterise individuals' brain activity. Here, we investigate the extent to which the exact spatial arrangement of cortical regions interacts with measures of brain connectivity. We find that the shape and exact location of brain regions interact strongly with the modelling of brain connectivity, and present evidence that the spatial arrangement of functional regions is strongly predictive of non-imaging measures of behaviour and lifestyle. We believe that, in many cases, cross-subject variations in the spatial configuration of functional brain regions are being interpreted as changes in functional connectivity. Therefore, a better understanding of these effects is important when interpreting the relationship between functional imaging data and cognitive traits.
Data availability
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Human Connectome ProjectFreely available upon agreeing with Open Access Data Use Terms and Restricted Data Use Terms ( https://www.humanconnectome.org/study/hcp-young-adult/document/quick-reference-open-access-vs-restricted-data).
Article and author information
Author details
Janine Diane Bijsterbosch
Funding
National Institutes of Health (1U54MH091657)
- David C Van Essen
Wellcome (098369/Z/12/Z)
- Stephen M Smith
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (864-12-003)
- Christian F Beckmann
Wellcome (091509/Z/10/Z)
- Stephen M Smith
Wellcome (203139/Z/16/Z)
- Stephen M Smith
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: HCP data were acquired using protocols approved by the Washington University institutional review board. Informed consent was obtained from subjects. Anonymised data are publicly available from ConnectomeDB (db.humanconnectome.org; Hodge et al., 2016). Certain parts of the dataset used in this study, such as the age of the subjects, are available subject to restricted data usage terms, requiring researchers to ensure that the anonymity of subjects is protected (Van Essen et al., 2013).
Copyright
© 2018, Bijsterbosch et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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The relationship between spatial configuration and functional connectivity of brain regions
eLife 7:e32992.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.32992
Further reading
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The exact location of certain brain regions is linked to intelligence, life satisfaction and other behavioural factors.
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- Neuroscience
- Physics of Living Systems
Neurons generate and propagate electrical pulses called action potentials which annihilate on arrival at the axon terminal. We measure the extracellular electric field generated by propagating and annihilating action potentials and find that on annihilation, action potentials expel a local discharge. The discharge at the axon terminal generates an inhomogeneous electric field that immediately influences target neurons and thus provokes ephaptic coupling. Our measurements are quantitatively verified by a powerful analytical model which reveals excitation and inhibition in target neurons, depending on position and morphology of the source-target arrangement. Our model is in full agreement with experimental findings on ephaptic coupling at the well-studied Basket cell-Purkinje cell synapse. It is able to predict ephaptic coupling for any other synaptic geometry as illustrated by a few examples.
