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A few thoughts on brain ROIs

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Abstract

Quantitative mapping of structural and functional connectivities in the human brain via non-invasive neuroimaging offers an exciting and unique opportunity to understand brain architecture. Because connectivity alterations are widely reported in a variety of brain diseases, assessment of structural and functional connectivities has emerged as a fundamental research area in clinical neuroscience. A fundamental question arises when attempting to map structural and functional connectivities: how to define and localize the best possible Regions of Interests (ROIs) for brain connectivity mapping? Essentially, when mapping brain connectivities, ROIs provide the structural substrates for measuring connectivities within individual brains and for pooling data across populations. Thus, identification of reliable, reproducible and accurate ROIs is critically important for the success of brain connectivity mapping. This paper discusses several major challenges in defining optimal brain ROIs from our perspective and presents a few thoughts on how to deal with those challenges based on recent research work done in our group.

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Acknowledgements

T Liu was supported by the NIH Career Award (NIH EB 006878), NIH R01 HL087923-03S2 and The University of Georgia start-up research funding. The author would like to thank Gang Li, Kaiming Li, Dajiang Zhu, Tuo Zhang, Chulwoo Lim, and Jianfei Yang for providing some of the figures used in this paper.

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  1. Department of Computer Science and Bioimaging Research Center, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, 30602, USA

    Tianming Liu

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Liu, T. A few thoughts on brain ROIs. Brain Imaging and Behavior 5, 189–202 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-011-9123-6

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