Structural foundations of resting-state and task-based functional connectivity in the human brain

Magnetic resonance imaging enables the noninvasive mapping of both anatomical white matter connectivity and dynamic patterns of neural activity in the human brain. We examine the relationship between the structural properties of white matter streamlines (structural connectivity) and the functional properties of correlations in neural activity (functional connectivity) within 84 healthy human subjects both at rest and during the performance of attention- and memory-demanding tasks. We show that structural properties, including the length, number, and spatial location of white matter streamlines, are indicative of and can be inferred from the strength of resting-state and task-based functional correlations between brain regions. These results, which are both representative of the entire set of subjects and consistently observed within individual subjects, uncover robust links between structural and functional connectivity in the human brain.