We present two related methods for deriving connectivity-based brain atlases from individual connectomes. The proposed methods exploit a previously proposed dense connectivity representation, termed continuous connectivity, by first performing graph-based hierarchical clustering of individual brains, and subsequently aggregating the individual parcellations into a consensus parcellation. The search for consensus minimizes the sum of cluster membership distances, effectively estimating a pseudo-Karcher mean of individual parcellations. We assess the quality of our parcellations using (1) Kullback-Liebler and Jensen-Shannon divergence with respect to the dense connectome representation, (2) inter-hemispheric symmetry, and (3) performance of the simplified connectome in a biological sex classification task. We find that the parcellation based-atlas computed using a greedy search at a hierarchical depth 3 outperforms all other parcellation-based atlases as well as the standard Dessikan-Killiany anatomical atlas in all three assessments.
@article{arxiv.1808.04262,
title = {Connectivity-Driven Brain Parcellation via Consensus Clustering},
author = {Anvar Kurmukov and Ayagoz Mussabayeva and Yulia Denisova and Daniel Moyer and Boris Gutman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.04262},
year = {2018}
}