Sophia Mueller
Tracing the functional and structural connectivity within the brain may provide means to see whether psychiatric illness is fundamentally routed in “connectopathies”—connectional abnormalities that lead to brain dysfunction. So far, only a few studies have combined functional and structural network explorations to ask this very basic question of how anatomic variability affects functional differences. The development of functional MRI and diffusion-based anatomic mapping techniques (eg, DTI), together with the possibility of computational modeling diversity in connectivity patterns, open new avenues for the discovery of brain function and pathway structures in vivo that provide insight into psychological mechanisms of psychiatric diseases.
The scope of our AJNR review articles was to give a brief methodologic overview of functional and structural neuroimaging methods, to summarize important findings in common neuropsychiatric disorders such as Alzheimer disease (AD), schizophrenia, and autism, and to delineate the first successful multimodal neuroimaging approaches in these diseases.
However, when embarking towards the discovery of altered neural connectivity in disease, it is essential to have a profound understanding of the connectional architecture of the human brain and its “normal” range of variability. Therefore, our current research focuses on multimodal brain imaging aimed at understanding individual differences in functional connectivity architecture and underlying anatomy. Understanding the normal range of individual variability in the human brain will help us identify and potentially treat regions likely to form abnormal circuitry, as manifested in neuropsychiatric disorders. In our recent study we could demonstrate that individual differences in mental domains, such as personality traits, can be linked to brain regions of high variability in functional connections.1