Exploring the functional connectome in white matter

Abstract

A major challenge in neuroscience is understanding how brain function emerges from the connectome. Most current methods have focused on quantifying functional connectomes in gray-matter (GM) signals obtained from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), while signals from white-matter (WM) have generally been excluded as noise. In this study, we derived a functional connectome from WM resting-state blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD)-fMRI signals from a large cohort (n = 488). The WM functional connectome exhibited weak small-world topology and nonrandom modularity. We also found a long-term (i.e., over 10 months) topological reliability, with topological reproducibility within different brain parcellation strategies, spatial distance effect, global and cerebrospinal fluid signals regression or not. Furthermore, the small-worldness was positively correlated with individuals' intelligence values (r = .17, p_corrected = .0009). The current findings offer initial evidence using WM connectome and present additional measures by which to uncover WM functional information in both healthy individuals and in cases of clinical disease.