MRI Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about MRI, including details on magnetic resonance imaging, neuroimaging, brain tumors.

Mapping human whole-brain structural networks with diffusion MRI.

Hagmann P, Kurant M, Gigandet X, Thiran P, Wedeen VJ, Meuli R, Thiran JP

Department of Radiology, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) and University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. patric.hagmann@epfl.ch

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.

Published 5 July 2007 in PLoS ONE, 2: e597.
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