IFOPASUBA

Disturbance of the balance of long-range and short-range connections is thought to be associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The core structure of the short-range connections is a set of U-shaped fiber bundles that circumvent the cortical folds. They have never been mapped at a large scale in the human brain, probably because of the large variability of the cortical folding patterns. We propose to leverage the emergence of a dictionary of the most frequent folding patterns to infer a specific U-bundle atlas for each such pattern. This dictionary of atlases inferred from the outstanding dataset of the Human Connectome Project will then be used to look for abnormal short-range connectivity in a large ASD dataset already collected in the context of a European project. We will finally validate the U-bundle organizations found abnormal using postmortem brains imaged with high resolution diffusion MRI performed at 11,7T and digitalized Klingler dissection.