Predicting cortical 3-hinge locations via structural connective features

Cortical folds encode crucial information of brain development, cytoarchitecture and function. It is widely accepted that common anatomy is preserved across individuals within species, while huge variation still hamper establishing fine-grained anatomical correspondences and predicting the locations of a specific anatomical pattern via conventional image registration methods, especially for complex cortical folding pattern, such as gyral 3-hinge. Recently, white matter axonal wiring patterns have been suggested to be strongly correlative to cortical folding patterns. Therefore, in this work, we studied the relation between complex 3-hinge folding patterns and structural connective patterns, and proposed effective methods to predict the locations of 3-hinges by using structural connective features and spatial distribution patterns. The prediction accuracy of our methods outperforms conventional image registration methods.