Multiscale and multimodal fusion of tract-tracing and DTI-derived fibers in macaque brains

Assessment of structural connectivity patterns of macaque brains may hold the key to understanding mechanism of cortical convolution and brain function. Therefore, lots of interests have been attracted to analyze axonal pathways via up-to-date techniques, such as tract-tracing data, which is taken as 'gold standard' to estimate trustworthy meso-scale pathways and diffusion MRI (e.g., DTI), from which macroscale brain connectivity map can be reconstructed. In this paper, we for the first time propose a framework to take advantages of the two modalities to identify cross-validated connections and construct corresponding dMRI fiber bundle atlas. This framework is conducted on a whole-brain-connectivity base by fusing information from dMRI derived connectivity maps and tract-tracing connectivity maps derived from CoCoMac database, in which tract-tracing reports are collated across a large research community and the tract-tracing connectivity maps are inferred in a meta-analysis fashion. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework by a variety of experiments.