U-shape short-range extrinsic connectivity organisation around the human central sulcus
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
U‑shape short‑range extrinsic connectivity organisation around the human central sulcus Alexandre Pron1 · Christine Deruelle1 · Olivier Coulon1 Received: 11 May 2020 / Accepted: 9 November 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
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. Keywords Central sulcus · U-fibre · Structural connectivity · Diffusion MRI
Introduction The study of terminations of the human brain connections, i.e., the structural connectivity, is of great interest (Sporns et al. 2005), in particular, to broaden our knowledge of neurodevelopmental processes [e.g., (Dubois et al. 2014)), functional organization (e.g., (Saygin et al. 2011; Wendelken et al. 2017)] and brain diseases [e.g., (Griffa et al. 2013)]. At the macroscopic scale, the connections of the white matter Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02177-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Olivier Coulon olivier.coulon@univ‑amu.fr Alexandre Pron [email protected] Christine Deruelle christine.deruelle@univ‑amu.fr 1
Institut de Neurosciences de La Timone, Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, UMR 7289, Marseille, France
are organized into fibre bundles called tracts and qualified as commissural, projection and association tracts according to the location of their terminations [e.g., (Mandonnet et al. 2018)]. Short association tracts (Meynert 1885), also referred to as U-shape fibres or U-fibres, connect two cortical areas located in adjacent gyri, traveling in the superficial white matter, right beneath the sixth cortical layer (Schmahmann and Pandya 2006).
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