Decoupling of brain function from structure reveals regional behavioral specialization in humans
By Maria Giulia Preti, D. Van de Ville. Nature Communications, 2019
328 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The brain is an assembly of neuronal populations interconnected by structural pathways. Brain activity is expressed on and constrained by this substrate. Therefore, statistical dependencies between functional signals in directly connected areas can be expected higher. However, the degree to which brain function is bound by the underlying wiring diagram remains a complex question that has been only partially answered. Here, we introduce the structural-decoupling index to quantify the coupling strength between structure and function, and we reveal a macroscale gradient from brain regions more strongly coupled, to regions more strongly decoupled, than expected by realistic surrogate data. This gradient spans behavioral domains from lower-level sensory function to high-level cognitive ones and shows for the first time that the strength of structure-function coupling is spatially varying in line with evidence derived from other modalities, such as functional connectivity, gene expression, microstructural properties and temporal hierarchy. The extent to which brain structure and function are coupled remains a complex question. Here, the authors show that coupling strength between structural connectivity and functional activity can be quantified and reveals a cortical gradient spanning from lower-level sensory areas to high-level cognitive ones.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f5678fdeeec1548ac6e40a6a723b55033f49f9c
Citations in the corpus
- Neurodevelopment of the association cortices: Patterns, mechanisms, and implications for psychopathology (2021, unknown): “…distance (Bazinet et al., 2020; Oligschl€ager et al., 2017; Sepulcre et al., 2010), functional connectivity patterns (Margulies et al., 2016), functional timescale length (Ito et al., 2020; Raut et al., 2020), and structure-function coupling (Baum et al., 2020; Preti and Van De Ville, 2019).”
- Linking Structure and Function in Macroscale Brain Networks. (2020, unknown): “Specifically, structure and function appear to be tightly coupled in unimodal sensory areas, but systematically decouple towards transmodal cortex at the apex of the hierarchy [63,81,82,100].”