Journal
CEREBRAL CORTEX
Volume 31, Issue 12, Pages 5308-5318Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhab159
Keywords
brain wiring; caudate; diffusion magnetic resonance imaging; prefrontal cortex; tractography
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health [R21MH121704, R01MH119222, P41EB015902, R01 MH074794, R21MH116352, K24MH110807, R01MH112748]
- VA Merit Award [I01CX000176-06]
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The study analyzed the brain wiring between the frontal cortex and caudate in 100 young adult healthy subjects using dMRI scans. It found that the wiring pattern deviates from a strictly topographic organization due to significant convergence in regionally specific fiber clusters, originating from subregions of ventrolateral, dorsolateral, and orbitofrontal prefrontal cortex. This deviation suggests a regionally specific pattern of cluster convergence in the brain wiring.
To assess normal organization of frontostriatal brain wiring, we analyzed diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) scans in 100 young adult healthy subjects (HSs). We identified fiber clusters intersecting the frontal cortex and caudate, a core component of associative striatum, and quantified their degree of deviation from a strictly topographic pattern. Using whole brain dMRI tractography and an automated tract parcellation clustering method, we extracted 17 white matter fiber clusters per hemisphere connecting the frontal cortex and caudate. In a novel approach to quantify the geometric relationship among clusters, we measured intercluster endpoint distances between corresponding cluster pairs in the frontal cortex and caudate. We show first, the overall frontal cortex wiring pattern of the caudate deviates from a strictly topographic organization due to significantly greater convergence in regionally specific clusters; second, these significantly convergent clusters originate in subregions of ventrolateral, dorsolateral, and orbitofrontal prefrontal cortex (PFC); and, third, a similar organization in both hemispheres. Using a novel tractography method, we find PFC-caudate brain wiring in HSs deviates from a strictly topographic organization due to a regionally specific pattern of cluster convergence. We conjecture cortical subregions projecting to the caudate with greater convergence subserve functions that benefit from greater circuit integration.
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