Human Brain Connectomics: Networks, Techniques, and Applications

The human brain is organized into a collection of interacting networks with specialized functions to support various cognitive functions. At the micro level, the brain elements consist of single neurons, the amount of which often treads the realm of hundreds of billions, and possible connections between them numbering in the order of 10¹⁵. At a more macro level, the brain is parcellated into a number of regions, where each region accounts for the activity and coactivity of a population of neurons. The colossal task of constructing structural description of the human brain calls for powerful tools for handling the vast amount of information given by advanced imaging techniques.

In the July 2010 issue of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, the column article by Pew-Thian Yap, Guorong Wu, and Dinggang Shen provides an overview of the fundamental concepts of human brain connectomics, the necessary techniques, and applications to date.

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