Functional gradients of the cerebellum

By Xavier Guell, Jeremy D. Schmahmann, John D. E. Gabrieli, Satrajit S. Ghosh. bioRxiv, 2018

382 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A central principle for understanding the cerebral cortex is that macroscale anatomy reflects a functional hierarchy from primary to transmodal processing. In contrast, the central axis of motor and nonmotor macroscale organization in the cerebellum remains unknown. Here we applied diffusion map embedding to resting-state data from the Human Connectome Project dataset (n=1003), and show for the first time that cerebellar functional regions follow a gradual organization which progresses from primary (motor) to transmodal (DMN, task-unfocused) regions. A secondary axis extends from task-unfocused to task-focused processing. Further, these two principal gradients reveal functional properties of the well-established cerebellar double motor representation, and its relationship with the recently described triple nonmotor representation. These interpretations are further supported by data-driven clustering and cerebello-cerebral functional connectivity analyses. Importantly, these descriptions remain observable at the individual subject level. These findings, from an exceptionally large and high-quality dataset, provide new and fundamental insights into the functional organization of the human cerebellum, unmask new testable hypotheses for future studies, and yield an unprecedented tool for the topographical, macroscale interpretation of cerebellar findings.

Subfields: Neurology, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0ea33b8db36f6009c7375bb7cc6883de46168a72

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Citations in the corpus

The cerebellum and cognition. (2019, neutral): “New analyses of rsfcMRI in the HCP (n=1003 subjects) using intrinsic cerebellar functional connectivity [79] further reveal that the cerebellum demonstrates the same kind of sensorimotor-to-cognition hierarchical gradient pattern that has long been established in the cerebral cortex [80].”
BrainSpace: a toolbox for the analysis of macroscale gradients in neuroimaging and connectomics datasets (2019, methodology): “Gradient analyses operating on connectivity data were applied to diffusion MRI tractography data in speci ﬁ c brain regions 12,13 as well as neocortical, hippocampal, and cerebellar resting-state functional MRI connectivity maps 11,14 – 20 .”
Neurodevelopment of the association cortices: Patterns, mechanisms, and implications for psychopathology (2021, neutral): “…the striatum, thalamus, hippocampus, and cerebellum, display regional S-A axes; these axes capture variation both in local function and in patterns of cortical connectivity (Guell et al., 2018; Haber, 2003; M€uller et al., 2020; Paquola et al., 2020b; Raut et al., 2020; Yang et al., 2020).”