Relationship between functional and structural connectivity of brain: Parcellation using the fMRI and the cortical thickness

Abstract

Since the beginning of neuroscience, various studies were investigated relationship between the function and the structure of the human brain. Especially, connectivity based parcellation studies were play important roles to understand relationship between functional and structural connectivity. Functional connectivity usually measured by using functional magnetic resonance imaging.(fMRI) However, most of previous studies were demonstrate structural connectivity with diffusion weighted image, even though fMRI was indirectly interpreted neuronal activity of gray matter. And also, when illustrating the functional connectivity, previous studies were analyzed in volume space. Analyze in volume space is seldom considered of the topology of the human brain. Inspired by these problems of previous study, in this study, we develop the surface based parcellation method, and we parcellated medial frontal cortex (MFC) with the fMRI and the cortical thickness. We also, investigated functional and structural connectivity using the parcellate results. Our findings showed that, on the basis of the pattern of functional and structural connectivity, the MFC could be parcellated into the anterior part (preSMA) and the posterior part (SMA) in both perspectives. Through the functional connectivity analysis, SMA was closely associated with motor control and preSMA was closely associated with complex/cognitive control. And also, there was a several correspondence region between functionally connected area with MFC sub-regions and structurally connected area with MFC sub-regions. Furthermore, this results demonstrated that correlation pattern of cortical thickness are directly associated with correlation pattern of their function. To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate the relationship between function and structure of the brain using surface based parcellation of MFC with the fMRI and the cortical thickness. Our finding may provide new insights to investigate relationship between function and structure of the human brain.