Conceptos Básicos
The shape of the brain's white matter connections is predictive of human language function.
Resumen
This study investigates the relationship between the shape of the brain's white matter connections and individual language performance. The key highlights are:
The study uses diffusion MRI tractography to reconstruct the brain's white matter connections as sequences of 3D points, which are then grouped into fiber clusters with different anatomical shapes.
In addition to traditional tissue microstructure and connectivity features, the study extracts 12 shape descriptors for each fiber cluster, including length, diameter, elongation, volume, surface area, and irregularity.
The authors introduce a novel deep learning framework called SFFormer that leverages a multi-head cross-attention module to fuse features from the shape, microstructure, and connectivity domains.
Experiments on a large dataset of 1065 healthy young adults show that the shape features, both individually and when fused with other features, outperform traditional microstructure and connectivity features in predicting individual language performance, as measured by vocabulary comprehension and oral reading tests.
The results indicate that the shape of the brain's white matter connections is an important factor in understanding and predicting human language function.
Estadísticas
The length of a fiber tract is calculated as the sum of the Euclidean distances between consecutive 3D coordinates along the streamlines, divided by the number of streamlines.
The span of a fiber tract is calculated as the Euclidean distance between the first and last 3D coordinates of the streamlines, divided by the number of streamlines.
The diameter of a fiber tract is calculated as 2 times the square root of the volume divided by pi times the length.
Citas
"Shape plays an important role in computer graphics, offering informative features to convey an object's morphology and functionality."
"The shape of the brain's white matter connections, which transmit information throughout the brain, has been much less studied."
"Overall, our results indicate that the shape of the brain's connections is predictive of human language function."