In vivo tractography of human locus coeruleus—relation to 7T resting state fMRI, psychological measures and single subject validity

The locus coeruleus (LC) in the brainstem as the main regulator of brain noradrenaline gains increasing attention because of its involvement in neurologic and psychiatric diseases and its relevance in general to brain function. In this study, we created a structural connectome of the LC nerve fibers based on in vivo MRI tractography to gain an understanding into LC connectivity and its impact on LC-related psychological measures. We combined our structural results with ultra-high field resting-state functional MRI to learn about the relationship between in vivo LC structural and functional connections. Importantly, we reveal that LC brain fibers are strongly associated with psychological measures of anxiety and alertness indicating that LC-noradrenergic connectivity may have an important role on brain function. Lastly, since we analyzed all our data in subject-specific space, we point out the potential of structural LC connectivity to reveal individual characteristics of LC-noradrenergic function on the single-subject level.