Connectomic consistency: a systematic stability analysis of structural and functional connectivity

Connectomics, the study of brain connectivity, has become an indispensable tool in neuroscientific research as it provides insights into brain organization. Connectomes are generated for different modalities such as using diffusion MRI to capture structural organization of the brain or using functional MRI to elaborate brain’s functional organization. Understanding links between structural and functional organizations is crucial in explaining how observed behavior emerges from the underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Many studies have investigated how these two organizations relate to each other; however, we still lack a proper understanding on how much variation should be expected on the two modalities, both between people cross-sectionally and within a single person longitudinally. Notably, connectomes of both modalities were shown to have significant differences depending on how they are generated. In this study, for both modalities, we systematically analyzed consistency of connectomes, that is the similarity between connectomes in terms of individual connections between brain regions or in terms of overall network topology. We present a comprehensive study of consistency in structural and resting-state functional connectomes both for a single subject examined longitudinally and across a large cohort of subjects cross-sectionally. We compared connectomes generated by different tracking algorithms, parcellations, edge weighting schemes, and edge pruning techniques. We evaluated consistency both at the levels of individual edges using correlation and at the level of network topology via graph matching accuracy. We also examined consistency of connectomes that are generated using most commonly applied communication schemes. Our results demonstrate varying degrees of consistency for the two modalities, with structural connectomes showing higher consistency than functional connectomes. Moreover, we observed a wide variation in consistency depending on how connectomes are generated. Our study sets a reference point for consistency of connectome types, which is especially important for structure-function coupling studies in evaluating mismatches between modalities.