Assessing Topographic Structural Connectivity of the Human Basal Ganglia and Thalamus

Irtiza A. Gilani; Kader K. Oguz; Huseyin Boyaci; Katja Doerschner

Integration of inputs to emotional, cognitive and motor functions may occur via these nonreciprocal connections, for example, between striatum and substantia nigra, between cortico-striatal projections from different functional regions, and between thalamus and subcortical regions via 2004; Menke RA et al., 2010; Aravamuthan BR et al., 2007; Draganski B et al., 2008] , post-mortem histological data [Gallay et al., 2008; Dyrby et al., 2007] , and translational connectivity analysis from non-human primates to humans [Mars et al., 2011] . Although these studies have made major contributions, there is still a lack of a comprehensive description of in vivo human subcortical circuitry. Here we provide such detailed connectivity analysis of the human subcortical brain regions using diffusion MRI data acquired with short repetition time (TR) and echo time (TE) at 3T.