Consistency in predicting functions from anatomical and functional connectivity profiles across the cortical cortex

Abstract

More and more studies had used connectivity profiles to predict functions of the brain. However, whether anatomical connectivity can predict functions consistently with functional connectivity in various functional domains and whether the connectivity-function relationship is universal across the whole cortex are unknown. Using a linear model, we discovered that anatomical connectivity was comparative to functional connectivity in explaining the variance of functions in most cortical regions, with the exception that anatomical connectivity had poor explaining abilities in brain areas which had high individual task variations. In addition, anatomical connectivity were not that good at capturing individual functional differences and had less inter-subject variation than functional connectivity, however anatomical connectivity could be regarded as more stable in the perspective of parcellation. The current results provided the first comprehensive picture of the relationships between functions and connectivity in the whole human cortex at a fine-grained brain atlas.