Recent work on brain connectivity modeling revealed that the topographic organization of this connectivity is not limited to large-scale anatomical pathways generally observable in diffusion MRI, thus reinforcing the interest of studies focusing on the characterization of cortical structural connectivity and its variability. Therefore, the estimation of relevant grey matter connectomes strongly relies on the choice of an ad’hoc cerebral parcellisation.
We propose a post doc project to first implement a probabilistic cortical atlas derived from cortical parcellisations defined individually to optimally extract cortical thickness and volume of each individual. The second aim of the post doc project is to compute cortical structural connectivity to quantify the inter-individual variability of brain organization together with the effects of specific factors such as gender, manual preference, functional lateralization or cognitive skills. The strength of the present project is that it will benefits from the already acquired BIL&GIN database composed of 453 healthy volunteers balanced for gender and handedness. Hence, the first probabilistic cortical atlas will be operated over a large sample, the 453 participants having been previously pre-processed.