Identifying Cross-individual Correspondences of 3-hinge Gyri

Human brain alignment based on imaging data has long been an intriguing research topic. One of the challenges is the huge inter-individual variabilities, which are pronounced not only in cortical folding patterns, but also in the underlying structural and functional patterns. Also, it is still not fully understood how to link the cross-subject similarity of cortical folding patterns to the correspondences of structural brain wiring diagrams and brain functions. Recently, a specific cortical gyral folding pattern was identified, which is the conjunction of gyri from multiple directions and termed a “gyral hinge”. These gyral hinges are characterized by the thickest cortices, the densest long-range fibers, and the most complex functional profiles in contrast to other gyri. In addition to their structural and functional importance, a small portion of 3-hinges found correspondences across subjects and even species by manual labeling. However, it is unclear if such cross-subject correspondences can be found for all 3-hinges, or if the correspondences are interpretable from structural and functional aspects. Given the huge variability of cortical folding patterns, we proposed a novel algorithm which jointly uses structural MRI-derived cortical folding patterns and diffusion-MRI-derived fiber shape features to estimate the correspondences. This algorithm was executed in a group-wise manner, whereby 3-hinges of all subjects were simultaneously aligned. The effectiveness of the algorithm was demonstrated by higher cross-subject 3-hinges’ consistency with respect to structural and functional metrics, when compared with other methods. Our findings provide a novel approach to brain alignment and an insight to the linkage between cortical folding patterns and the underlying structural connective diagrams and brain functions.