Simultaneously Probing Functional and Structural Brain Connectivity in Real-time - Fibernavigator: An Interactive Tool for Brain Visualization

Maxime Chamberland, Maxime Descoteaux, Kevin Whittingstall, David Fortin

2014

Abstract

The human brain can be viewed as a collection of networks. Those highly specialized networks can be referred to as a set of nodes (gray matter functional areas) linked together by edges (for example white matter axonal structure). Functional MRI (fMRI) can provide 4D whole-brain images that indicates changes in cortical blood flow, volume and oxygen ratio as well (Blood-Oxygenation-Level-Dependant or BOLD signal) caused by cerebral activity across time (Bandettini et al. 1993; Kwong et al. 1992; Turner 1992). The spontaneous low fluctuations (< 0.1 Hz) present in the BOLD signal allow the detection temporally correlated spatial patterns, also known as Resting State Networks (RSNs) when the brain is at rest (Biswal et al. 1995; Damoiseaux et al. 2006). A common method of obtaining those networks is to extract the BOLD time course from an a priori region of interest (ROI) and perform the temporal correlation with all other voxels of the brain. The result is a correlation map or a functional connectivity map based on the location of the seed ROI. Some have proposed a tool for voxel-wise brain connectivity visualization but it often requires the pre-calculation of a correlation matrix to be held in memory (Dixhoorn 2012). Great effort was also made towards GPU implementation of functional connectivity exploration (Eklund et al. 2011) However, the proposed software restrict the user from placing their reference ROI directly into the 3D space which greatly reduces the level of interactivity. Another tool was proposed for neurosurgical application which quickly allows the user to interrogate data for pre-surgical planning (Böttger et al. 2011). Here, the user is forced to move the ROI solely on 2D anatomical slices, thus only revealing activations present on those selected slices. In this work, we propose an interactive tool for the exploration of functional connectivity in a fully 3D fashion, which can be coupled with our existing real-time fiber tracking module inside the Fibernavigator (Chamberland et al. 2014). Using a healthy volunteer dataset, we qualitatively demonstrate how both functional and structural modules can be merged together for efficient brain mapping exploration.

References

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Chamberland M., Descoteaux M., Whittingstall K. and Fortin D. (2014). Simultaneously Probing Functional and Structural Brain Connectivity in Real-time - Fibernavigator: An Interactive Tool for Brain Visualization . In - NEUROTECHNIX, ISBN , pages 0-0


in Bibtex Style

@conference{neurotechnix14,
author={Maxime Chamberland and Maxime Descoteaux and Kevin Whittingstall and David Fortin},
title={Simultaneously Probing Functional and Structural Brain Connectivity in Real-time - Fibernavigator: An Interactive Tool for Brain Visualization},
booktitle={ - NEUROTECHNIX,},
year={2014},
pages={},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={},
isbn={},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - - NEUROTECHNIX,
TI - Simultaneously Probing Functional and Structural Brain Connectivity in Real-time - Fibernavigator: An Interactive Tool for Brain Visualization
SN -
AU - Chamberland M.
AU - Descoteaux M.
AU - Whittingstall K.
AU - Fortin D.
PY - 2014
SP - 0
EP - 0
DO -