Human white matter tracts aligned with canonical functional brain networks

Abstract

White matter tracts form the structural backbone of large-scale brain networks, yet their relation to functional organization remains poorly defined. Although major pathways are well characterized anatomically, their relationship to distributed cognitive systems has not been systematically established. Here, we constructed a population-level white matter tract termination atlas and projected tract endpoints onto the cortical surface to characterize their spatial organization. We integrated this atlas with large-scale meta-analytic decoding to derive functional profiles for individual tracts. Functional decoding revealed that white matter tracts exhibited distinct and biologically interpretable cognitive signatures. Hierarchical clustering of these profiles further showed that tracts organize into coherent ensembles defined by shared functional associations. These tract ensembles recapitulated canonical intrinsic brain networks across multiple cortical atlases, including a notable ensemble that demonstrated alignment with the default mode, salience, and frontoparietal control networks, corresponding to the core architecture of the triple-network model of cognitive control. This finding identified a candidate structural backbone linking distributed functional systems implicated across neuropsychiatric conditions. Together, these results demonstrate that white matter architecture is organized according to large-scale functional principles and establish a tract-to-network framework for linking structural connectivity to cognition.