Generation of Individual Whole-Brain Atlases With Resting-State fMRI Data Using Simultaneous Graph Computation and Parcellation

The human brain can be characterized as functional networks. Therefore, it is important to subdivide the brain appropriately in order to construct reliable networks. Resting-state functional connectivity-based parcellation is a commonly used technique to fulfill this goal. Here we propose a novel individual subject-level parcellation approach based on whole-brain resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. We first used a supervoxel method known as simple linear iterative clustering directly on resting-state fMRI time series to generate supervoxels, and then combined similar supervoxels to generate clusters using a clustering method known as graph-without-cut (GWC). The GWC approach incorporates spatial information and multiple features of the supervoxels by energy minimization, simultaneously yielding an optimal graph and brain parcellation. Meanwhile, it theoretically guarantees that the actual cluster number is exactly equal to the initialized cluster number. By comparing the results of the GWC approach and those of the random GWC approach, we demonstrated that GWC does not rely heavily on spatial structures, thus avoiding the challenges encountered in some previous whole-brain parcellation approaches. In addition, by comparing the GWC approach to two competing approaches, we showed that GWC achieved better parcellation performances in terms of different evaluation metrics. The proposed approach can be used to generate individualized brain atlases for applications related to cognition, development, aging, disease, personalized medicine, etc. The major source codes of this study have been made publicly available at https://github.com/yuzhounh/GWC.