Abstract
It is thought that brain structure is the primary determinant of functions of brain regions. For example, cortical areas with functional differences also have different structural connectivity (SC) patterns. We used SCs derived from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data in 100 healthy adults included in the Human Connectome Project (HCP) to successfully predict cortical activation responses across distinct cognitive tasks and found that predictive performance varied among tasks. We also observed that predictive performance could be used to characterize task load in both relational reasoning and N-back working memory tasks and was significantly positively associated with behavioral performance. Moreover, we found that the default mode network (DMN) played a more dominant role in both activation prediction and behavioral performance than was found for other functional networks. These results support our hypothesis that individuals who performed tasks better might exhibit a more accurate predicted activation pattern as task-evoked activities are more inclined to flow over inherent structural networks than over more flexible paths. In the high difficulty condition, the decreased correlation between predicted and empirical activation may be associated with the more random brain activity in these conditions/participants due to the lack of engagement. Together, our findings highlight the feasibility of using SCs to estimate various cognitive task activations and thus further facilitate the exploration of the relationship between the brain and behavior by providing strong evidence for the relevance of structure to function in the human brain.
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Availability of data and material
All the imaging data used in this study are available in the Human Connectome Project’s Connectome DB repository (https://db.humanconnectome.org) under the identifiers ‘WU-Minn HCP Data’ and ‘100 Unrelated Subjects’.
Code availability
Codes are availiable in the GitHub repository (https://github.com/Tiantianhub/Activityflow_dti).
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge all the participants. We thank Yan Yan for her help and contribution during data processing.
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This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant Number 2018YFC0115400), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers U20A20191, 61727807), and the Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission (Grant Number Z191100010618004).
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TY conceptualized and designed the study; TL wrote the paper; JA performed the data analysis; ZS downloaded the data; JZ revised the paper; GP and JW interpreted the data. All authors agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.
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Yan, T., Liu, T., Ai, J. et al. Task-induced activation transmitted by structural connectivity is associated with behavioral performance. Brain Struct Funct 226, 1437–1452 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-021-02249-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-021-02249-0