Abstract #0570

Functional connectome of autonomic, limbic, nociceptive, and sensory brainstem nuclei using 7 Tesla resting-state fMRI in living humans

Simone Cauzzo^1,2, Kavita Singh², Matthew Stauder², Maria Guadalupe Garcia Gomar², Nicola Vanello³, Claudio Passino^1,4, Jeffrey Staab^5,6, Iole Indovina^7,8, and Marta Bianciardi²

¹Life Sciences Institute, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy, ²Brainstem Imaging Laboratory, Department of Radiology, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, ³Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, ⁴Fondazione Toscana Gabriele Monasterio, Pisa, Italy, ⁵Department of Psychiatry and Psychology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, United States, ⁶Department of Otorhinolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, United States, ⁷Department of Biomedical and Dental Sciences and Morphofunctional Imaging, University of Messina, Messina, Italy, ⁸Laboratory of Neuromotor Physiology, IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation, Roma, Italy

With the goal of bridging the gap between cortical and subcortical (e.g. brainstem) functional connectomes and of defining a baseline for clinical studies, we computed the resting-state functional connectivity maps of 15 brainstem nuclei involved in central autonomic, limbic, nociceptive and sensory functions. We used images acquired with 7 Tesla MRI on a group of 20 healthy subjects and a recently generated probabilistic atlas of brainstem nuclei. We obtained highly significant and stable links with a good overlap with the literature. Our results also provide favorable results on the translatability of our brainstem connectome approach to conventional 3 Tesla data-sets.

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