The Human Connectome: A Structural Description of the Human Brain

By Olaf Sporns, Giulio Tononi, Rolf Kötter. 2005

3,280 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT The connection matrix of the human brain (the human “connectome”) represents an indispensable foundation for basic and applied neurobiological research. However, the network of anatomical connections linking the neuronal elements of the human brain is still largely unknown. While some databases or collations of large-scale anatomical connection patterns exist for other mammalian species, there is currently no connection matrix of the human brain, nor is there a coordinated research effort to collect, archive, and disseminate this important information. We propose a research strategy to achieve this goal, and discuss its potential impact.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

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Citations in the corpus

Weight Agnostic Neural Networks (2019, background): “While it is a challenge to map out the human connectome [102], with our 90 billion neurons and 150 trillion synapses, the connectome of simple organisms such as roundworms [112, 114] has been constructed, and recent works [20, 105] mapped out the entire brain of a small fruit ﬂy.”
Simple models of human brain functional networks (2012, background): “Its organization de ﬁ es complete description at a cellular scale (3); but neuroimagingtechniquesforwhole-brainscanninghavebeenused todescribenetworkorganization,orconnectomics,atanatomicalscalesontheorderofmillimetersandcentimeters(2).”
The Need for Multi-Omics Biomarker Signatures in Precision Medicine (2019, background): “It has also yielded a plethora of other ‘omics’ terms, such as lipidomics [11,12], metagenomics [13], glycomics [14], connectomics [15], cellomics [16], and even foodomics [17,18].”
Great Expectations: Using Whole-Brain Computational Connectomics for Understanding Neuropsychiatric Disorders (2014, background): “The connectome is defined as a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain on many spatial scales (Sporns et al., 2005).”
GRETNA: a graph theoretical network analysis toolbox for imaging connectomics (2015, background): “Mapping and characterization of the underlying structural and functional connectivity patterns of the human brain (i.e., connectomics; Sporns et al., 2005; Biswal et al., 2010) in both typical and atypical population is therefore fundamental since they provide invaluable insights into how the…”
Imaging human connectomes at the macroscale (2013, background): “Higher-strength gradient systems enable high b values (desirable for fiber tracking) in shorter (1) Box 1 oPTImIzInG fmRI AnD dmRI ImAGE ACqUIsITIon”
Criticality in Large-Scale Brain fMRI Dynamics Unveiled by a Novel Point Process Analysis (2012, methodology): “, 2009), allowing for instance the unraveling of the functional connectivity between all possible brain regions, as is done under the Connectome project (Sporns et al., 2005; Sporns, 2011)1.”
Semantic Image Segmentation with Contextual Hierarchical Models (2015, methodology): “CHM outperforms many existing algorithms for membrane detection and can be used as the ﬁrst step towards reconstruction of the connectome, i.e., the map of neural connectivity in the mammalian nervous system [23].”
Dipy, a library for the analysis of diffusion MRI data (2014, background): “The connection matrix that results from an exhaustive connectivity analysis of all parts of the cerebral cortex is sometimes referred to as a connectome (Sporns et al., 2005) and understanding the structure and function of the connectome is a central goal of contemporary neuroscience.”
Neurophysiological and Computational Principles of Cortical Rhythms in Cognition (2010, background): “To make progress, we need to know a lot more about the brain connectome (92, 586, 860, 897, 996).”
Tractography - where do we go from here? (2011, neutral): “Determining the wiring diagram of the human brain is one of the greatest challenges in neuroscience (Sporns et al., 2005).”
Three-dimensional reconstruction of brain-wide wiring networks in Drosophila at single-cell resolution. (2011, background): “However, because of interindividual variation in synaptic arborization, a mesoscopic approach at the resolution of light microscopy is best suited for the first initial construction of brain-wide interregional connectivity maps in model systems such as the fruit fly and the mouse [1, 5, 7].”
The hubs of the human connectome are generally implicated in the anatomy of brain disorders (2014, background): “(Sporns et al., 2005) has potentially important implications for understanding clinical brain disorders (Bullmore and Sporns, 2012; Fornito et al.”
Structural foundations of resting-state and task-based functional connectivity in the human brain (2013, background): “The brain exhibits both sparse and variable SC, with far fewer anatomical connections than would be expected at random (16) and with patterns of connectivity that vary between individuals (1).”
Modeling the Impact of Lesions in the Human Brain (2009, background): “We believe that this result applies generally to the type of network and neural dynamics investigated here, and will hold even as the human connectome [39] continues to be refined.”