Combined Three-Dimensional Visualization of Structural Connectivity and Cortex Parcellation

Abstract

The human cortex is organized in spatially distinct regions of different functional units. Cortex parcellations based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of living human subjects are common practice, and recently, structural connectivity from diffusion weighted resonance imaging (dwMRI) have been successfully applied to generate such parcellations. The exploration of structural connectivity data together with cortex parcellations has proven to be challenging due to overlapping tracts and structures, limited depth perception, and the large number of tracts, which clutter the visualization. However, the involvement of structural connectivity forces such visualizations to act in anatomical space. While structural connectivity can be communicated using three-dimensional or slicebased visualizations, cortex parcellations are visualized on three-dimensional surfaces. In this work, we solve this problem by proposing an interactive illustrative 3D visualization for both structural connectivity data and cortex parcellations in anatomical space. We achieve this by providing an abstract visualization of the structural connectivity while still being able to provide the full detail on demand. Our visualization furthermore employs interactivity and illustrative depth-enhancing, which are supported by anatomical context and textual annotations and thus help the user to build a mental map of the connections in the brain. Functional and effective connectivity might benefit from such a combined visualization as they use cortex parcellations as well.