TY - JOUR
T1 - Detailed mapping of human habenula resting-state functional connectivity
AU - Ely, Benjamin A.
AU - Stern, Emily R.
AU - Kim, Joo won
AU - Gabbay, Vilma
AU - Xu, Junqian
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Healt h (grant numbers R33-MH107589 and R01-MH111794 to ERS, R01-MH101479 and R01-MH095807 to VG, and F31-MH109257 to BAE); the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (grant number FG-1606-24492 to J-WK); and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (grant number NARSAD22324 to JX).
Funding Information:
We are grateful to Drs. Abraham Z. Snyder, Matthew F. Glasser, and David C. Van Essen at Washington University School of Medicine for discussions related to the interpretation of our results, and to Mr. Chen Yang at the Translational and Molecular Imaging Institute in the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) for assistance with data management. This work was supported in part through the computational resources and staff expertise provided by ISMMS Scientific Computing, with additional resource support provided by the ISMMS Brain Imaging Center. Data were provided by the Human Connectome Project, WU-Minn Consortium (Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil; U54-MH091657), funded by the 16 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier Inc.
PY - 2019/10/15
Y1 - 2019/10/15
N2 - The habenula (Hb) inhibits dopaminergic reward signaling in response to negative outcomes and has been linked to numerous functional domains relevant to mental health, including reward prediction, motivation, and aversion processing. Despite its important neuroscientific and clinical implications, however, the human Hb remains poorly understood due to its small size and the associated technical hurdles to in vivo functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigation. Using high-resolution 3 T fMRI data from 68 healthy young adults acquired through the Human Connectome Project, we developed a rigorous approach for mapping the whole-brain resting-state functional connectivity of the human Hb. Our study combined an optimized strategy for defining subject-level connectivity seeds to maximize Hb blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal sensitivity with high-quality surface-based alignment for robust functional localization and cortical sensitivity. We identified significant positive Hb connectivity with: (i) conserved brainstem targets, including the dopaminergic ventral tegmental area, serotonergic raphe nuclei, and periaqueductal gray; (ii) subcortical structures related to reward and motor function, including the nucleus accumbens, dorsal striatum, pallidum, thalamus, and cerebellum; and (iii) cortical areas associated with the Salience Network and early sensory processing, including the dorsal anterior cingulate, anterior insula, and primary visual and auditory cortices. Hb connectivity was strongly biased towards task-positive brain regions, with weak or negative connectivity observed throughout the task-negative Default Mode Network. Our study provides a detailed characterization of Hb resting-state functional connectivity in healthy young adults, demonstrating both the feasibility and clinical potential of studying the human Hb using high-resolution 3 T fMRI.
AB - The habenula (Hb) inhibits dopaminergic reward signaling in response to negative outcomes and has been linked to numerous functional domains relevant to mental health, including reward prediction, motivation, and aversion processing. Despite its important neuroscientific and clinical implications, however, the human Hb remains poorly understood due to its small size and the associated technical hurdles to in vivo functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigation. Using high-resolution 3 T fMRI data from 68 healthy young adults acquired through the Human Connectome Project, we developed a rigorous approach for mapping the whole-brain resting-state functional connectivity of the human Hb. Our study combined an optimized strategy for defining subject-level connectivity seeds to maximize Hb blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal sensitivity with high-quality surface-based alignment for robust functional localization and cortical sensitivity. We identified significant positive Hb connectivity with: (i) conserved brainstem targets, including the dopaminergic ventral tegmental area, serotonergic raphe nuclei, and periaqueductal gray; (ii) subcortical structures related to reward and motor function, including the nucleus accumbens, dorsal striatum, pallidum, thalamus, and cerebellum; and (iii) cortical areas associated with the Salience Network and early sensory processing, including the dorsal anterior cingulate, anterior insula, and primary visual and auditory cortices. Hb connectivity was strongly biased towards task-positive brain regions, with weak or negative connectivity observed throughout the task-negative Default Mode Network. Our study provides a detailed characterization of Hb resting-state functional connectivity in healthy young adults, demonstrating both the feasibility and clinical potential of studying the human Hb using high-resolution 3 T fMRI.
KW - Default mode network
KW - Pain
KW - Reward
KW - Salience
KW - Sensory cortex
KW - fMRI
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U2 - 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.06.015
DO - 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.06.015
M3 - Article
C2 - 31252057
AN - SCOPUS:85068860053
VL - 200
SP - 621
EP - 634
JO - NeuroImage
JF - NeuroImage
SN - 1053-8119
ER -