Amber M. Howell
The spatial extent of anatomical connections within the thalamus varies across the cortical hierarchy in humans and macaques
Howell, Amber M.; Warrington, Shaun; Fonteneau, Clara; Cho, Youngsun T.; Sotiropoulos, Stamatios N.; Murray, John D.; Anticevic, Alan
Authors
Mr Shaun Warrington Shaun.Warrington1@nottingham.ac.uk
Senior Research Fellow
Clara Fonteneau
Youngsun T. Cho
Professor STAMATIOS SOTIROPOULOS STAMATIOS.SOTIROPOULOS@NOTTINGHAM.AC.UK
PROFESSOR OF COMPUTATIONAL NEUROIMAGING
John D. Murray
Alan Anticevic
Abstract
Each cortical area has a distinct pattern of anatomical connections within the thalamus, a central subcortical structure composed of functionally and structurally distinct nuclei. Previous studies have suggested that certain cortical areas may have more extensive anatomical connections that target multiple thalamic nuclei, which potentially allows them to modulate distributed information flow. However, there is a lack of quantitative investigations into anatomical connectivity patterns within the thalamus. Consequently, it remains unknown if cortical areas exhibit systematic differences in the extent of their anatomical connections within the thalamus. To address this knowledge gap, we used diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) to perform brain-wide probabilistic tractography for 828 healthy adults from the Human Connectome Project. We then developed a framework to quantify the spatial extent of each cortical area’s anatomical connections within the thalamus. Additionally, we leveraged resting-state functional MRI, cortical myelin, and human neural gene expression data to test if the extent of anatomical connections within the thalamus varied along the cortical hierarchy. Our results revealed two distinct cortico-thalamic tractography motifs: 1) a sensorimotor cortical motif characterized by focal thalamic connections targeting posterolateral thalamus, associated with fast, feed-forward information flow; and 2) an associative cortical motif characterized by diffuse thalamic connections targeting anteromedial thalamus, associated with slow, feed-back information flow. These findings were consistent across human subjects and were also observed in macaques, indicating cross-species generalizability. Overall, our study demonstrates that sensorimotor and association cortical areas exhibit differences in the spatial extent of their anatomical connections within the thalamus, which may support functionally-distinct cortico-thalamic information flow.
Citation
Howell, A. M., Warrington, S., Fonteneau, C., Cho, Y. T., Sotiropoulos, S. N., Murray, J. D., & Anticevic, A. The spatial extent of anatomical connections within the thalamus varies across the cortical hierarchy in humans and macaques
Working Paper Type | Preprint |
---|---|
Deposit Date | Mar 4, 2024 |
Publicly Available Date | Oct 29, 2024 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.95018.1 |
Public URL | https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/32162278 |
Publisher URL | https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/95018v1 |
Files
The spatial extent of anatomical connections within the thalamus varies across the cortical hierarchy in humans and macaques
(1.4 Mb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
You might also like
Objective QC for diffusion MRI data: artefact detection using normative modelling
(2024)
Journal Article
Generalising XTRACT tractography protocols across common macaque brain templates
(2024)
Journal Article
Denoising Diffusion MRI: Considerations and implications for analysis
(2023)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Repository@Nottingham
Administrator e-mail: discovery-access-systems@nottingham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search