Assessing brain wiring patterns using tractography fiber clustering to study sex differences of the frontostriatal white matter connections

We studied structural connectivity differences between females and males in frontostriatal white matter connections. We proposed a novel method to measure the topographical organization of the frontostriatal circuits, leveraging a data-driven fiber clustering of whole-brain dMRI tractography. The proposed topographical measure provides important information to assess the segregated and integrative brain wiring patterns in the human brain. We applied this technique to test for sex differences in a cohort of 100 healthy subjects. We identified significant group differences in the frontostriatal white matter connections, potentially related to the sex-specific brain wiring patterns.