Species preserved and exclusive structural connections revealed by sparse CCA

Abstract

Brain evolution has been an intriguing research topic for centuries. Efforts have been denoted to identifying structural connectome preserved between macaques and humans and the one exclusive to one species. However,recent studies mainly focus on one specific fasciculus or one region. The similarity and difference of global structural connection network in macaque and human are still largely unknown. In this work,we used diffusion MRI (dMRI) to estimate the whole brain large-scale white matter pathways and Brodmann areas as a test bed to construct a global connectome for the two species. We adopted sparse canonical correlation analysis (SCCA) algorithm to yield the weights which can be applied to the connectome to produce the components strongly correlated between the two species. Joint analysis of the weights helped to identify the preserved white matter pathways and those exclusive to a specific species. The results are consistent with the reports in the literatures,demonstrating the effectiveness and promise of this framework.