Multimodal Brain Visualization

Abstract

Current connectivity diagrams of human brain image data are either overly complex or overly simplistic. In this work we introduce simple yet accurate interactive visual representations of multiple brain image structures and the connectivity among them. We map cortical surfaces extracted from human brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data onto 2D surfaces that preserve shape (angle), extent (area), and spatial (neighborhood) information for 2D (circular disk) and 3D (spherical) mapping, split these surfaces into separate patches, and cluster functional and diffusion tractography MRI connections between pairs of these patches. The resulting visualizations are easier to compute on and more visually intuitive to interact with than the original data, and facilitate simultaneous exploration of multiple data sets, modalities, and statistical maps.