Leonardo Cerliani1, Helen D'Arceuil2,
Rajat M. Thomas3, Saad Jbabdi4, Christian M. Keysers1
1Neuroscience, University Medical
Center Groningen, Neuroimaging Center, Groningen, Netherlands; 2Dept.
of Radiology, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging,
Massachusetts General Hospital, United States; 3Kapteyn
Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, Netherlands; 4FMRIB
Centre, Univ. of Oxford, John Radcliffe Hospital, United Kingdom
The
connectivity of the macaque insula was analyzed by means of probabilistic
tractography on diffusion-weighted images. The main aim was to detect and
analyze trajectories of connectivity variation in this brain region, and to
test the consistency of the results with the available anatomical evidence
from animal literature. The employed method of laplacian eigenmaps was able
to recover the expected gradual change in connectivity, and to discriminate
this with the sharp transition in connectivity featured by the medial motor
cortex