Atlas-guided parcellation: Individualized functionally-homogenous parcellation in cerebral cortex.

Resting-state Magnetic resonance imaging-based parcellation aims to group the voxels/vertices non-invasively based on their connectivity profiles, which has achieved great success in understanding the fundamental organizational principles of the human brain. Given the substantial inter-individual variability, the increasing number of studies focus on individual parcellation. However, current methods perform individual parcellations independently or are based on the group prior, requiring expensive computational costs, precise parcel alignment, and extra group information. In this work, an efficient and flexible parcellation framework of individual cerebral cortex was proposed based on a region growing algorithm by merging the unassigned and neighbor vertex with the highest-correlated parcel iteratively. It considered both consistency with prior atlases and individualized functional homogeneity of parcels, which can be applied to a single individual without parcel alignment and group information. The proposed framework was leveraged to 100 unrelated subjects for functional homogeneity comparison and individual identification, and 186 patients with Parkison's disease for symptom prediction. Results demonstrated our framework outperformed other methods in functional homogeneity, and the generated parcellations provided 100% individual identification accuracy. Moreover, the default mode network (DMN) exhibited higher functional homogeneity, intra-subject parcel reproducibility and fingerprinting accuracy, while the sensorimotor network did the opposite, reflecting that the DMN is the most representative, stable, and individual-identifiable network in the resting state. The correlation analysis showed that the severity of the disease symptoms was related negatively to the similarity of individual parcellation and the atlases of healthy populations. The disease severity can be correctly predicted using machine learning models based on individual topographic features such as parcel similarity and parcel size. In summary, the proposed framework not only significantly improves the functional homogeneity but also captures individualized and disease-related brain topography, serving as a potential tool to explore brain function and disease in the future.

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare no competing financial interests.