The Human Thalamus Is an Integrative Hub for Functional Brain Networks

By Kai Hwang, Maxwell A. Bertolero, William B. Liu, Mark D'Esposito. Journal of Neuroscience, 2016

553 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The thalamus is globally connected with distributed cortical regions, yet the functional significance of this extensive thalamocortical connectivity remains largely unknown. By performing graph-theoretic analyses on thalamocortical functional connectivity data collected from human participants, we found that most thalamic subdivisions display network properties that are capable of integrating multimodal information across diverse cortical functional networks. From a meta-analysis of a large dataset of functional brain-imaging experiments, we further found that the thalamus is involved in multiple cognitive functions. Finally, we found that focal thalamic lesions in humans have widespread distal effects, disrupting the modular organization of cortical functional networks. This converging evidence suggests that the human thalamus is a critical hub region that could integrate diverse information being processed throughout the cerebral cortex as well as maintain the modular structure of cortical functional networks. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The thalamus is traditionally viewed as a passive relay station of information from sensory organs or subcortical structures to the cortex. However, the thalamus has extensive connections with the entire cerebral cortex, which can also serve to integrate information processing between cortical regions. In this study, we demonstrate that multiple thalamic subdivisions display network properties that are capable of integrating information across multiple functional brain networks. Moreover, the thalamus is engaged by tasks requiring multiple cognitive functions. These findings support the idea that the thalamus is involved in integrating information across cortical networks.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b55b15386b1e2142117df674859bf3cfb160679

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Kai Hwang
2. James M. Shine
3. Michael W. Cole
4. Justin Riddle

In Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

1. Kai Hwang
2. Michael W. Cole
3. James M. Shine

Citations in the corpus

• Cortical functional hierarchy disruption following subcortical stroke (2026, unknown): “Network analyses highlight subcortical nucleus gates information flow between unimodal sensory regions and higher-order association networks [5–7].”
• Thalamocortical contributions to cognitive task activity (2022, methodology): “To compare the task hubs to the FC hubs that we had mapped previously (Hwang et al., 2017), we first obtained a thalamocortical FC matrix using principal component linear regression (Ito et al.”