Joint Representation of Functional and Structural Profiles for Identifying Common and Consistent 3-Hinge Gyral Folding Landmark

The 3-hinge is a form of cortical fold, which is the intersection of the three gyri. And it has been proved to be unique anatomically, structurally, and functionally connective patterns. Compared with the normal gyri, the 3-hinge gyri have stronger structural connectivity and participate in more functional networks. Therefore, it is of great significance to further explore the 3-hinge regions, which could give more new insights on the study of mechanism of cortical folding patterns. However, for the large differences in brain across subjects, it is difficult to identify consistent 3-hinge regions across subjects and most previous studies on 3-hinges consistency merely focused on a single mode. In order to study the multi-modal consistency of 3-hinge regions, this paper proposes a joint representation of functional and structural profiles for identifying common and consistent 3-hinges. We use the representation of 3-hinge patterns in the functional network to obtain the functional consistency of 3-hinges cross subjects, then the distance between 3-hinge regions and Dense Individualized and Common Connectivity-Based Cortical Landmarks (DICCCOL) system to obtain the structural consistency. Combining these two sets of stability, 38 functionally and structurally consistent 3-hinge regions were successfully identified cross subjects. These consistent 3-hinge regions based on multi-modal data are more consistent than that merely based on structural data and experimental results elucidate those consistent 3-hinge regions are more correlated with visual function. This work deepens the understanding of the stability of 3-hinge regions and provides a basis for further inter-group analysis of 3-hinge gyral folding.