A Convergent Functional Architecture of the Insula Emerges Across Imaging Modalities

By Clare Kelly, Roberto Toro, A. di Martino, Christine L. Cox, Lune P Bellec, F. X. Castellanos, Michael P. Milham. NeuroImage, 2012

378 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Empirical evidence increasingly supports the hypothesis that patterns of intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) are sculpted by a history of evoked coactivation within distinct neuronal networks. This, together with evidence of strong correspondence among the networks defined by iFC and those delineated using a variety of other neuroimaging techniques, suggests a fundamental brain architecture detectable across multiple functional and structural imaging modalities. Here, we leverage this insight to examine the functional organization of the human insula. We parcellated the insula on the basis of three distinct neuroimaging modalities – task-evoked coactivation, intrinsic (i.e., task-independent) functional connectivity, and grey matter structural covariance. Clustering of these three different covariance-based measures revealed a convergent elemental organization of the insula that likely reflects a fundamental brain architecture governing both brain structure and function at multiple spatial scales. While not constrained to be hierarchical, our parcellation revealed a pseudo-hierarchical, multiscale organization that was consistent with previous clustering and meta-analytic studies of the insula. Finally, meta-analytic examination of the cognitive and behavioral domains associated with each of the insular clusters obtained elucidated the broad functional dissociations likely underlying the topography observed. To facilitate future investigations of insula function across healthy and pathological states, the insular parcels obtained here have been made freely available for download via http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org, along with the analytic scripts used to perform the parcellations.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3cce6bcaeeeb06697babc68bb89f6e0c13996de2

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Olaf Sporns
2. Jeff H. Duyn
3. Xiao Liu
4. Jiaojian Wang
5. Lingzhong Fan
6. Gustavo Deco
7. D. Bassett
8. E. Bullmore

Citations in the corpus

• Time-varying functional network information extracted from brief instances of spontaneous brain activity (2013, methodology): “spatial similarity using the k-means clustering method (see SI Materials and Methods for details), which has been frequently used in resting-state fMRI data analysis (39, 40, 49).”
• Contributions and challenges for network models in cognitive neuroscience (2014, background): “…estimate the strength with which individual regions associate with their own network community—for example, through measures of participation 40 , cluster stability 40,41 and consensus clustering 42 —thus providing information on regional roles in neural processing within and across communities.”
• The Human Brainnetome Atlas: A New Brain Atlas Based on Connectional Architecture (2016, positive): “Finally, it has been shown that structural covariance patterns are largely in agreement with the aforementioned methods (Kelly et al. 2012).”
• Decision and response monitoring during working memory are sequentially represented in the human insula (2022, unknown): “Cytoarchitectural, imaging, and modeling studies report a spatial posterior-to-anterior gradient linked to a progressive integration of complex behaviors including top–down control 17,23–26 .”