Abstract
Connectomics—the study of brain networks—provides a unique and valuable opportunity to study the brain. Research in human connectomics, leveraging functional and diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), is a resource-intensive practice. Typical analysis routines require significant computational capabilities and subject matter expertise. Establishing a pipeline that is low-resource, easy to use, and off-the-shelf (can be applied across multifarious datasets without parameter tuning to reliably estimate plausible connectomes), would significantly lower the barrier to entry into connectomics, thereby democratizing the field by empowering a more diverse and inclusive community of connectomists. We therefore introduce ‘MRI to Graphs’ (m2g). To illustrate its properties, we used m2g to process MRI data from 35 different studies (≈ 6,000 scans) from 15 sites without any manual intervention or parameter tuning. Every single scan yielded an estimated connectome that adhered to established properties, such as stronger ipsilateral than contralateral connections in structural connectomes, and stronger homotopic than heterotopic correlations in functional connectomes. Moreover, the connectomes estimated by m2g are more similar within individuals than between them, suggesting that m2g preserves biological variability. m2g is portable, and can run on a single CPU with 16 GB of RAM in less than a couple hours, or be deployed on the cloud using its docker container. All code is available on https://github.com/neurodata/m2g and documentation is available on docs.neurodata.io/m2g.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
↵† is the contact for CoRR ⟨xinian.zuo{at}bnu.edu.cn⟩
CoRR Members Xi-Nian Zuo, Michael P. Milham, Jeffrey S. Anderson, Pierre Bellec, Rasmus M. Birn, Bharat B. Biswal, Janusch Blautzik, John C.S. Breitner, Randy L. Buckner, F. Xavier Castellanos, Antao Chen, Bing Chen, Jiang-tao Chen, Xu Chen, Stanley J. Colcombe, William Courtney, Adriana Di Martino, Hao-Ming Dong, Xiaolan Fu, Qiyong Gong, Krzysztof J. Gorgolewski, Ying Han, Ye He, Yong He, Erica Ho, Avram Holmes, Xiao-Hui Hou, Jeremy Huckins, Tianzi Jiang, Yi Jiang, William Kelley, Clare Kelly, Margaret King, Stephen M. LaConte, Janet E. Lain-hart, Xu Lei, Hui-Jie Li, Kaiming Li, Kuncheng Li, Qixiang Lin, Dongqiang Liu, Jia Liu, Xun Liu, Guangming Lu, Jie Lu, Beatriz Luna, Jing Luo, Daniel Lurie, Ying Mao, Andrew R. Mayer, Thomas Meindl, Mary E. Meyerand, Weizhi Nan, Jared A. Nielsen, David O’Connor, David Paulsen, Vivek Prabhakaran, Zhigang Qi, Jiang Qiu, Chun-hong Shao, Zarrar Shehzad, Weijun Tang, Arno Villringer, Huiling Wang, Kai Wang, Dongtao Wei, Gao-Xia Wei, Xu-Chu Weng, Xuehai Wu, Ting Xu, Ning Yang, Zhi Yang, Yu-Feng Zang, Lei Zhang, Qinglin Zhang, Zhe Zhang, Zhiqiang Zhang, Ke Zhao, Zonglei Zhen, Yuan Zhou, Xing-Ting Zhu.
Updated author list; author affiliations updated; figures updated