The Organization of Frontostriatal Brain Wiring in Healthy Subjects Using a Novel Diffusion Imaging Fiber Cluster Analysis

Abstract

To assess normal organization of frontostriatal brain wiring, we analyzed diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) scans in 100 young adult healthy subjects (HSs). We identified fiber clusters intersecting the frontal cortex and caudate, a core component of associative striatum, and quantified their degree of deviation from a strictly topographic pattern. Using whole brain dMRI tractography and an automated tract parcellation clustering method, we extracted 17 white matter fiber clusters per hemisphere connecting the frontal cortex and caudate. In a novel approach to quantify the geometric relationship among clusters, we measured intercluster endpoint distances between corresponding cluster pairs in the frontal cortex and caudate. We show first, the overall frontal cortex wiring pattern of the caudate deviates from a strictly topographic organization due to significantly greater convergence in regionally specific clusters; second, these significantly convergent clusters originate in subregions of ventrolateral, dorsolateral, and orbitofrontal prefrontal cortex (PFC); and, third, a similar organization in both hemispheres. Using a novel tractography method, we find PFC-caudate brain wiring in HSs deviates from a strictly topographic organization due to a regionally specific pattern of cluster convergence. We conjecture cortical subregions projecting to the caudate with greater convergence subserve functions that benefit from greater circuit integration.

Hemispheric Cortical, Cerebellar and Caudate Atrophy Associated to Cognitive Impairment in Metropolitan Mexico City Young Adults Exposed to Fine Particulate Matter Air Pollution

“…Strikingly, the poorer cognitive performance in MMC residents was associated with caudate and left orbital gyrus atrophy in keeping with orbital frontal cortex connections with regions processing visual, spatial, emotional information and social cognition, PFCcaudate brain wiring, and caudate functions affecting learning, memory, reward and motivation [69][70][71][72][73][74]. The current findings are not unexpected, i.e., the cerebellar atrophy is significant and could have a clinical counterpart in gait and equilibrium abnormalities described by our group in young MMC urbanites [75], cognitive deficits [16,57], the association between hearing loss and decreased brainstem and cerebellar volumes in AD cases [76], and gait and cognitive abnormalities associated with regional cerebellar atrophy in elderly fallers [77].…”

White matter association tracts underlying language and theory of mind: An investigation of 809 brains from the Human Connectome Project

“…For each subject, we identified white matter association tracts using a robust machine learning approach that has been shown to consistently identify white matter tracts across the full human lifespan, across health conditions including brain tumors, and across different image acquisitions ( Zhang et al, 2018b ). Furthermore, the method has high test-retest reproducibility ( Zhang et al, 2019 ) and has been employed in multiple recent studies ( Gong et al, 2018 ; Irimia et al, 2020 ; Kochsiek et al, 2021 ; Levitt et al, 2021 ). This method is implemented in the WMA package, which uses a well-established fiber clustering pipeline ( O’Donnell et al, 2012 ; O’Donnell and Westin, 2007 ) in conjunction with an anatomical white matter tract atlas ( Zhang et al, 2018b ).…”

Sleep Quality Disturbances Are Associated with White Matter Alterations in Veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

“…This method is significantly improved compared to previous automated fiber tracking methods, which can only extract the main fiber tracts, failing to cover the entire brain's white matter (i.e., including the cerebellum and superficial tracts). In addition, it was successfully applied in several recent studies [85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94], demonstrating high test-retest reproducibility [95] and robustness to anatomical variability [96].…”

“…To ensure there were no individual participants with outlier values, we performed a quantitative quality assessment of the number of fiber streamlines. Moreover, each participant's whole-brain white matter tracts were visually evaluated, following standardized guidelines [85,89,[108][109][110][111]. All data successfully passed the quality check.…”