The Budapest Reference Connectome Server v2.0

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Budapest Reference Connectome Server v2.0, which generates consensus brain connectomes from multiple MRI datasets, providing a robust, customizable, and visualized graph representation of human brain connectivity.

Contribution

It presents a new server that creates common connectome edges from 96 MRI datasets, allowing parameter customization and providing downloadable, annotated, and visualized brain graphs.

Findings

Generated consensus connectomes serve as low-noise reference models.

The server allows customizable filtering and visualization.

Provides downloadable graphs with anatomical annotations.

Abstract

The connectomes of different human brains are pairwise distinct: we cannot talk about an abstract "graph of the brain". Two typical connectomes, however, have quite a few common graph edges that may describe the same connections between the same cortical areas. The Budapest Reference Connectome Server Ver. 2.0 (http://connectome.pitgroup.org) generates the common edges of the connectomes of 96 distinct cortexes, each with 1015 vertices, computed from 96 MRI data sets of the Human Connectome Project. The user may set numerous parameters for the identification and filtering of common edges, and the graphs are downloadable in both csv and GraphML formats; both formats carry the anatomical annotations of the vertices, generated by the Freesurfer program. The resulting consensus graph is also automatically visualized in a 3D rotating brain model on the website. The consensus graphs, generated with various parameter settings, can be used as reference connectomes based on different, independent MRI images, therefore they may serve as reduced-error, low-noise, robust graph representations of the human brain.