Happy to share that our article “Human lifespan changes in the brain’s functional connectome” is now published online at Nature Neuroscience @natureneuro.bsky.social !
Many thanks to all collaborators & data contributors, and the editor team & reviewers!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A huge thanks to all my amazing coauthors, especially @metricsemma.bsky.social 😊
🔗 Read the full paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 9/9
We’ve long sought to understand how genetic and biomechanical forces shape cortical folding, and how that relates to actual functional areas. Hopefully, this work takes a small step toward deeper understanding. 8/9
Folding-Function links?
Aligning individual HCP task functional activation maps & multi-modal parcellations (Glasser, M. F. et al) using MSM-HT, we find that better structural alignment did not improve functional overlap. 7/9
Cortical folding motifs are heritable.
Using MZ and DZ twins data from the HCP young adults, we found motifs co-occurred more frequently in MZ siblings than DZ across all lobes. 6/9
Neonates vs. Adults: What changes?
We observed consistency across both age groups, with neonatal samples showing less variation. However, rightward-asymmetric folding clusters had greater temporal lobe surface area than leftward - reversed in adults. 5/9
Greater asymmetry in the temporal lobe.
A higher proportion of temporal lobe clusters were leftward-asymmetric compared to other lobes. These motifs showed more anatomical heterogeneity than rightward ones, including interruptions and branching of the superior temporal sulcus. 4/9
Disentangling natural cortical shape variability from clinically relevant features starts with better characterizing its scale across large populations. Here, we introduce MSM-HT to parse cortical folding variability into a representative family of distinct anatomical motifs. 3/9
🧠 What shapes cortical folding?
Cortical folding is widely regarded as an interplay between genetic programming and biomechanical forces. Abnormal folding patterns are frequently observed in neurodevelopmental conditions and psychiatric disorders. 2/9
I'm very excited to share my PhD work "Motifs of brain cortical folding from birth to adulthood: structural asymmetry and folding-functional links". We identified and characterised the lobe-wise folding patterns using both 1110 young adults (HCP) and 781 term-age neonates (dHCP & BIBS studies). 1/9