Integrating anatomical and functional alignment in neuroimaging

COEX 

Traditional neuroimaging methods assume that a particular brain function corresponds to the same anatomical locus across individuals. If the anatomical locus corresponding to a given function differs across individuals, then functional data will be misaligned, reducing power in group studies. Functional alignment accounts for individual differences by mapping from one individual's brain vertices to another individual's vertices on the basis of similar functional activations rather than anatomy alone. However, functional alignment can discard useful anatomical constraints. In this talk, I demonstrate that an interpolation between anatomical alignment and functional alignment outperforms either alignment method alone. The judicious combination of anatomical and functional information accounts for individual heterogeneity in functional topographies, increasing the predictive power of the resulting brain maps.