Parcellation of human inferior parietal lobule based on diffusion MRI

The function of a brain region can be constrained by its anatomical connections. The Inferior Parietal Lobule (IPL) is a cortical region with marked functional heterogeneity, involved in visuospatial attention, memory, language and mathematical cognition. In this work three different variants of the normalized graph-cut clustering algorithm were applied to obtain a parcellation of the IPL of living subjects into component regions based on the estimate of anatomical connectivity obtained from diffusion tensor tractography. Results over the three different algorithms were compared and a new metric proposed to measure the quality of individual parcellations by comparing to standard atlas regions. In this study of 19 subjects, an average of 64% overlap with the Juelich brain atlas was observed.