As part of an international collaboration team, the research group led by Prof. Xi-Nian Zuo who is a PI of Key Laboratory of Behavioral Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with research groups from National University of Singapore (leading institution), VISN 17 Center of Excellence for Research on Returning War Veterans, Washington University in St. Louis, Yale University, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, and Massachusetts General Hospital, have established the local-global, multi-scale functional parcellations based on the resting state brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data of 1600 healthy adult volunteers.

        The human cerebral cortex contains a highly complex hierarchical structure, corresponding to functional hierarchy and organizational characteristics. Resting-state fMRI is a reliable and noninvasive brain imaging technique, and has been widely applied to study the intrinsic hierarchy of cortical function. Previous cortical parcellations are generally based on local gradient algorithm or global similarity algorithm, in which way the multi-scale structure of the cortex is neglected.

        This large-scale international cooperation study integrates both local gradient algorithm and global similarity algorithm into a Markov Random Field weighted by gradient (gwMRF) model, achieving the goal of mapping the intrinsic hierarchical function of the human cortex. The consistency and stability of the multi-scale parcellations were demonstrated by comparing with the brain atlases informed with cell architecture, the visual topological map, the task function, and the brain connectivity map. Importantly, this set of the multi-scale functional parcellations exhibits a high degree of reproducibility and applicability in brain imaging datasets throughout the human lifespan (6-85 years old), providing a universal construction element of connectomics to study the changes of brain functional connectivity through different age groups.

        This work was supported by Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 2, National University of Singapore (NUS) Strategic Research, NUS School of Medicine Aspiration Fund, Singapore National Medical Research Council, NUS Young Investigator Award and the Singapore National Research Foundation Fellowship, NIMH, National Basic Research (973) Program and the Natural Science Foundation of China. All the parcellations’ maps can be downloaded from https://github.com/ThomasYeoLab/CBIG/tree/master/stable_projects/brain_parcellation/Schaefer2018_LocalGlobal