Biologically inspired alignment reveals distributed and directionally asymmetric correspondence between rat and human cortices
Rodent models enable causal interrogation of brain circuits, but translating their systems-level organization to humans requires correspondence beyond one-to-one anatomical homology. Guided by the view that cortical areas are characterized by their relationships within distributed functional networks, we developed BrainMapping, a biologically inspired framework for aligning rat and human cortex…
Biological insights have shed light on the alignment of cortical areas between rats and humans, allowing for a deeper understanding of their functional networks. By leveraging rodent models to investigate brain circuits, researchers have been able to establish connections that extend beyond simple anatomical correspondences. A novel framework, called BrainMapping, has been devised to align rat and human cortices using resting-state functional MRI data.
This approach incorporates a shared representation and optimal transport to generate bidirectional, probabilistic maps that accurately reflect the relationships within these functional networks.
The results of this study reveal a complex web of distributed, many-to-many correspondences between rat and human cortices. These correspondences hold up consistently across different subjects, preserving the functional connectivity architecture, cortical gradients, and graph topology. Notably, the organizational patterns observed in rat cortices exhibit directionality when mapped onto human cortices.
Mapping from human to rat tends to maintain organization more uniformly across various rat cortical systems, while rat-to-human mapping demonstrates stronger preservation in regions associated with higher-order functions, such as the default-mode and salience systems. These findings align with existing literature and offer testable predictions for future research.
By employing this biologically inspired framework, scientists can now express the functional organization of rat cortices in the context of human functional networks. This breakthrough paves the way for a more comprehensive understanding of the similarities and differences between these two species' brain architectures, ultimately contributing to our knowledge of how the brain functions across species.
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