It is a fact that the brain cortical folding pattern morphology is specific to each human being. Neuroanatomists think that the folding pattern is strongly related to brain connectivity [1]. As each folding variation implies a specific rearrangement of the different white matter bundles, it also impacts the position of functional regions. This particularity raises an issue for precise brain spatial normalization, as nobody knows how to align brains with different folding patterns. For this reason, in the field of brain segmentation, old fashion approaches relying on a single model, often generated from a single subject or a group's average, cannot overcome the folding variability. Therefore, modern strategies are often built from a multi-subject atlas, which has proven to be a very efficient solution to overcome this difficulty [2]. In order to design an analogous solution for brain mapping, it was recently proposed to restrict statistical analysis to groups of subjects with compatible folding pattern [3], which has been experimented to deal with the impact of the central sulcus morphology on fMRI-based activation maps [4]. Differences in the cortical folding have been proved to be associated with differences in the localization of functional areas. Therefore, we need to understand better how to relate to each other brains with different folding patterns. In this abstract, we propose a new step in this direction: we performed a first attempt to observe an effect of a simple morphological polymorphism related to central sulcus on the underlying U-fiber organization.
展开▼
