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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on September 3, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp182
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Noninvasive Functional and Structural Connectivity Mapping of the Human Thalamocortical System

Dongyang Zhang1, Abraham Z. Snyder1, Joshua S. Shimony1, Michael D. Fox1 and Marcus E. Raichle1,2,3,4,5

1 Department of Radiology, 2 Department of Neurology, 3 Department of Neurobiology, 4 Department of Psychology, 5 Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University, St Louis, MO 63110, USA

Address correspondence to Dongyang Zhang, BA, Department of Radiology, Washington University, USA. Email: zhangd{at}npg.wustl.edu.

Relating structural connectivity with functional activity is fundamentally important to understanding the brain's physiology. The thalamocortical system serves as a good model system for exploring structure/function relationships because of its well-documented anatomical connectivity. Here we performed functional and structural magnetic resonance mapping of the human thalamocortical system using intrinsic brain activity and diffusion-weighted imaging. The accuracy of these imaging techniques is tested by comparison with human histology registered to common anatomical space and connectional anatomy derived from nonhuman primates. In general, there is good overall concordance among structural, functional, and histological results which suggests that a simple model of direct anatomical connectivity between the cerebral cortex and the thalamus is capable of explaining much of the observed correlations in neuronal activity. However, important differences between structural and functional mapping results are also manifest which suggests a more complex interpretation and emphasizes the unique contributions from structural and functional mapping.

Key Words: DTI • fcMRI • functional connectivity • resting state • thalamus

Received for publication May 13, 2009. Revision received July 14, 2009. Accepted for publication August 2, 2009.


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