Identifying the Structural Connectome of the Brain in Health and Disease

Affiliation: This work was done under Prof. Pratik Mukherjee, MD, PhD of UCSF, Prof. Ashish Raj, PhD, of Cornell, and Dr. Julia Owen, PhD, of UCSF.

Summary: While the structural connectome of the brain has emerged as a powerful tool towards understanding the progression of neurologic and psychiatric disorders, links between the anatomy of connections within the brain and the effects of localized white matter pathology on cognition are still an active area of investigation. In this project, we proposed the use of the diffusion process towards understanding perturbations of brain connectivity. We first found that while the dynamics of this process are strongly conserved in healthy subjects, they display significant, interpretable deviations in agenesis of the corpus callosum, one of the most common brain malformations. Afterwards, we adapted our methodology towards investigating traumatic brain injury, using a combination of our systems theory metrics and machine learning to accurately diagnose cases of traumatic brain injury in a pediatric cohort for whom most cases displayed no visible MRI findings without our added analyses. In an independent dataset, we also showed that our methods could be used to predict the long-term outcome of traumatic brain injury by utilizing MRI scans taken within two weeks of injury. These findings when taken together illustrate converging evidence towards understanding the relationship between white matter anatomy and the structural connectome.

Papers so far (2015-2017):

PLOS: Computational Biology: PubMed PMID: 28640803

Brain Connectivity: PubMed PMID: 27345586

Poster (July, 2015):