Contralateral cerebello-thalamo-cortical pathways with prominent involvement of associative areas in humans in vivo

Abstract

In addition to motor functions, it has become clear that in humans the cerebellum plays a significant role in cognition too, through connections with associative areas in the cerebral cortex. Classical anatomy indicates that neo-cerebellar regions are connected with the contralateral cerebral cortex through the dentate nucleus, superior cerebellar peduncle, red nucleus and ventrolateral anterior nucleus of the thalamus. The anatomical existence of these connections has been demonstrated using virus retrograde transport techniques in monkeys and rats ex vivo. In this study, using advanced diffusion MRI tractography we show that it is possible to calculate streamlines to reconstruct the pathway connecting the cerebellar cortex with contralateral cerebral cortex in humans in vivo. Corresponding areas of the cerebellar and cerebral cortex encompassed similar proportion (about 80 %) of the tract, suggesting that the majority of streamlines passing through the superior cerebellar peduncle connect the cerebellar hemispheres through the ventrolateral thalamus with contralateral associative areas. This result demonstrates that this kind of tractography is a useful tool to map connections between the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex and moreover could be used to support specific theories about the abnormal communication along these pathways in cognitive dysfunctions in pathologies ranging from dyslexia to autism.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00429-014-0861-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Long-term supratentorial brain structure and cognitive function following cerebellar tumour resections in childhood

“…Cerebellar and cerebral areas co-activate during the performance of a wide range of cognitive tasks (Balsters et al, 2014;Stoodley and Schmahmann, 2009) and several studies using resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) report functional connectivity between the cerebellum and cerebral networks involved in both cognitive functions and motor control (Bernard et al, 2014;Buckner et al, 2011;Habas et al, 2009;Krienen and Buckner, 2009;O'Reilly et al, 2010;Ramnani, 2006;Sang et al, 2012). In line with these observations, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) based tractography has provided evidence for white-matter tracts between the dentate nucleus -a major source of cerebellar output -and prefrontal and parietal areas (Jissendi et al, 2008;Palesi et al, 2014;Ramnani, 2006), suggesting extensive structural connections between the cerebellum and the associative cerebral cortex in humans.…”

Quantification of voxel-wise total fibre density: Investigating the problems associated with track-count mapping

“…without SIFT or without any of the length-scaled related variants) therefore still has an important role to play, not as a quantitative map, but rather as a high-contrast anatomical image, particularly when used with super-resolution. This quality was in fact exploited in a number of recent TDI studies, including studies in ex vivo mouse brain (Calamante et al, 2012a;Kurniawan et al, 2014;Richards et al, 2014), ex vivo zebrafish brain (Ullmann et al, 2015), and in vivo human brain (Cho et al, 2015;Palesi et al, 2014). These studies demonstrate that there is still an important role for the high contrast standard TDI maps, regardless of this contrast originating in part from tractography biases.…”

Diffusion Tractography Biomarkers of Pediatric Cerebellar Hypoplasia/Atrophy: Preliminary Results Using Constrained Spherical Deconvolution

“…2 Several studies have shown that advanced fiber tractography algorithms provide invaluable qualitative and quantitative information on the brain WM microstructure that cannot be obtained with conventional structural neuroimaging sequences. 2,4 Developments in high-angular-resolution diffusion imaging 5,6 and progress in postprocessing software that take into ac-count multiple fiber orientations in the same voxel have improved the correct anatomic reconstruction of WM tracts such as the afferent and efferent cerebellar pathways [5][6][7][8][9] by accommodating crossing fibers. Improvements in fiber tractography of the cerebellar pathways are important because a large number of congenital, acquired, or degenerative diseases of pediatric [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] and adult 27-31 populations affect the cerebellum.…”