A Measure of Whole-Brain White Matter Topography

Abstract

The unprecedentedly high-quality large-scale brain imaging datasets, from such as the Human Connectome Project (HCP) and UK-Biobank, provide a unique opportunity for measuring the white matter topography of the human brain. By leveraging the multi-shell diffusion MRI data from the original young adult HCP, we systematically develop a reliable measure of the whole-brain white matter topography, and we coin it topographic vector. As the main result, we find that the three most dominant dimensions of the topographic vectors strongly and linearly correlate with the coordinates of the corresponding streamlines of the whole-brain tractograms. Our results support the earlier prescient hypothesis that brain development follows a “base-plan” established by three (main) chemotactic gradients of early embryogenesis, and they implicate that the whole brain white matter tracts can be represented by vectors of a natural coordinate system.