Abstract
Understanding the large-scale structural network formed by neurons is a major challenge in system neuroscience. A detailed connectivity map covering the entire brain would therefore be of great value. Based on diffusion MRI, we propose an efficient methodology to generate large, comprehensive and individual white matter connectional datasets of the living or dead, human or animal brain. This non-invasive tool enables us to study the basic and potentially complex network properties of the entire brain. For two human subjects we find that their individual brain networks have an exponential node degree distribution and that their global organization is in the form of a small world.
Highlights
Biological neuronal networks, and in particular the human brain, are remarkable natural systems capable of complicated patterns of behavior
A graph of the human brain consisting of 1011 nodes and 1016 edges is impossible to obtain with current techniques, but it would carry a great deal of information that is irrelevant from the global organization point of view
In this paper we propose a methodology derived from diffusion MRI tractography [12,13,14,15] to map at a millimetric scale the structural white matter connectivity of the whole brain
Summary
Biological neuronal networks, and in particular the human brain, are remarkable natural systems capable of complicated patterns of behavior. To understand the mechanisms behind higher-level brain functions, a detailed study of the individual neural cells is clearly insufficient [2]; global functional and structural properties of such a complex system need to be considered as well [3]. This requires, first of all, a good knowledge of the network architecture of the entire brain. The most obvious is at the neuronal level, where each neuron is a separate node in the graph and physical connections between neurons are reflected by the edges This detailed view, is feasible only for the most primitive animals such as C. elegans with a brain made of 302 neurons [4]. An immense effort will be needed to map at various scales and to create a large database of reliable information on the brain connectivity of higher order animals, especially of the human [10,11]
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