Abstract
The central sulcus is probably one of the most studied folds in the human brain, owing to its clear relationship with primary sensory-motor functional areas. However, due to the difficulty of estimating the trajectories of the U-shape fibres from diffusion MRI, the short structural connectivity of this sulcus remains relatively unknown. In this context, we studied the spatial organization of these U-shape fibres along the central sulcus. Based on high quality diffusion MRI data of 100 right-handed subjects and state-of-the-art pre-processing pipeline, we first define a connectivity space that provides a comprehensive and continuous description of the short-range anatomical connectivity around the central sulcus at both the individual and group levels. We then infer the presence of five major U-shape fibre bundles at the group level in both hemispheres by applying unsupervised clustering in the connectivity space. We propose a quantitative investigation of their position and number of streamlines as a function of hemisphere, sex and functional scores such as handedness and manual dexterity. Main findings of this study are twofold: a description of U-shape short-range connectivity along the central sulcus at group level and the evidence of a significant relationship between the position of three hand related U-shape fibre bundles and the handedness score of subjects.
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Data were provided by the Human Connectome Project, WU-Minn Consortium (Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil; 1U54MH091657) funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Pr. Alessandro Daducci for his precious advice and discussion about the COMMIT framework. Data were provided by the Human Connectome Project, WU-Minn Consortium (Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil; 1U54MH091657) funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University.
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Alexandre Pron is supported by doctoral a grant from Aix-Marseille University.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. AP implemented the processing pipeline and performed meshes visual quality control. OC and AP manually drew the surface cortical landmarks of the central sulcus onto the grey matter/white matter interface meshes. All authors contributed to the statistical analyses, the preparation, the writing and the correction of the article. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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The code used to carry out the analyses of the current study is publicly available at https://github.com/alexpron/article_central_sulcus_connectivity.
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Pron, A., Deruelle, C. & Coulon, O. U-shape short-range extrinsic connectivity organisation around the human central sulcus. Brain Struct Funct 226, 179–193 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02177-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02177-5