Evaluating the Strength of Structural Connectivity Underlying Brain Functional Networks

In recent years, there has been strong interest in neuroscience studies to investigate brain organization through networks of brain regions that demonstrate strong functional connectivity (FC). Several well-known functional networks have been consistently identified in both task-related and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) across different study populations. These networks are extracted from observed fMRI using data-driven analytic methods such as independent component analysis. A notable limitation of these FC methods is that they do not include or provide any information on the underlying structural connectivity (SC), which is believed to serve as the basis for interregional interactions in brain activity. We propose a new statistical measure of the strength of SC (sSC) underlying FC networks obtained from data-driven methods. The sSC is developed using information from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data. A key advantage of sSC is that it is a standardized coeffici...