Scaling principles of white matter brain connectivity

Abstract

Brains come in many shapes and sizes. Nature has endowed big-brained primate species like humans with a proportionally large cerebral cortex. White matter connectivity - the brains infrastructure for long-range communication - might not always scale at the same pace as the cortex. We investigated the consequences of this allometric scaling for white matter brain network connectivity. Structural T1 and diffusion MRI data were collated across fourteen primate species, describing a comprehensive 350-fold range in brain volume. We report volumetric scaling relationships that point towards a restriction in macroscale connectivity in larger brains. Building on previous findings, we show cortical surface to outpace white matter volume and the corpus callosum, suggesting the emergence of a white matter bottleneck of lower levels of connectedness through the corpus callosum in larger brains. At the network level, we find a potential consequence of this bottleneck in shaping connectivity patterns, with homologous regions in the left and right hemisphere showing more divergent connectivity in larger brains. Our findings show conserved scaling relationships of major brain components and their consequence for macroscale brain circuitry, providing a comparative framework for expected connectivity architecture in larger brains such as the human brain.