A whole-cortex probabilistic diffusion tractography connectome

The WU-Minn Human Connectome Project (HCP) is a publicly-available dataset containing state-of-art structural, functional, and diffusion-MRI for over a thousand healthy subjects. While the planned scope of the HCP included an anatomical connectome, resting-state functional-MRI forms the bulk of the HCP’s current connectomic output. We address this by presenting a full-cortex connectome derived from probabilistic diffusion tractography and organized into the HCP-MMP1.0 atlas. Probabilistic methods and large sample sizes are preferable for whole-connectome mapping as they increase the fidelity of traced low-probability connections. We find that overall, connection strengths are lognormally distributed and decay exponentially with tract length, that connectivity reasonably matches macaque histological tracing in homologous areas, that contralateral homologs and left-lateralized language areas are hyperconnected, and that hierarchical similarity influences connectivity. We compare the diffusion-MRI connectome to existing resting-state fMRI and cortico-cortico evoked potential connectivity matrices and find that it is more similar to the latter. This work helps fulfill the promise of the HCP and will make possible comparisons between the underlying structural connectome and functional connectomes of various modalities, brain states, and clinical conditions. Significance Statement The tracts between cortical parcels can be estimated from diffusion MRI, but most studies concentrate on only the largest connections. Here we present an atlas, the largest and most detailed of its kind, showing connections among all cortical parcels. Connectivity is relatively enhanced between frontotemporal language areas and homologous contralateral locations. We find that connectivity decays with fiber tract distance more slowly than predicted by brain volume and that structural and stimulation-derived connectivity are more similar to each other than to resting-state functional MRI correlations. The connectome presented is publicly available and organized into a commonly used scheme for defining brain areas in order to enable ready comparison to other brain imaging datasets of various modalities.