RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Euclidean distance as a measure of ventral and dorsal white matter connectivity
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 053959
DO 10.1101/053959
A1 Philipp Kellmeyer
YR 2016
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/17/053959.abstract
AB Fiber tractography based on diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has become an important in-vivo tool for investigating the anatomical connectivity between brain regions. Combining DTI with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows for the mapping of the structural and functional architecture of large-scale networks for cognitive processing. This line of research has shown that ventral and dorsal fiber pathways subserve different aspects of stimulus-and task-dependent processing in the brain.Here we investigate the feasibility and usefulness of Euclidean distance (ED) as a simple geometric measure to differentiate ventral and dorsal long-range white matter fiber pathways between parietal and inferior frontal cortex in a body of studies that used probabilistic tractography.We show that ventral pathways between parietal and inferior cortex, on average have a significantly longer ED in 3D-coordinate space than dorsal pathways. This finding needs to be further validated in analyzing studies that used different fiber tracking methods for detecting ventral/dorsal pathways between other brain regions. Thus, it could provide a simple measure and potentially a boundary value to assess patterns of connectivity in the large body of fMRI studies in the absence of DTI data. This would allow for a much broader assessment of general patterns of ventral and dorsal large-scale connectivity for different cognitive operations.