Voxelwise spectral diffusional connectivity and its applications to Alzheimer's disease and intelligence prediction

Abstract

Human brain connectivity can be studied using graph theory. Many connectivity studies parcellate the brain into regions and count fibres extracted between them. The resulting network analyses require validation of the tractography, as well as region and parameter selection. Here we investigate whole brain connectivity from a different perspective. We propose a mathematical formulation based on studying the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix of the diffusion tensor field at the voxel level. This voxelwise matrix has over a million parameters, but we derive the Kirchhoff complexity and eigen-spectrum through elegant mathematical theorems, without heavy computation. We use these novel measures to accurately estimate the voxelwise connectivity in multiple biomedical applications such as Alzheimer's disease and intelligence prediction. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.