Inter-hemispheric asymmetries in the population variances and covariances of measures characterizing the shapes and sizes of human brain regions

ARENAZA, BAUTISTA; VALLEJO AZAR, MARIANA NAHIR; ELIZALDE ACEVEDO, BAUTISTA; ALBA FERRARA, LUCÍA; BENDERSKY, MARIANA; GONZALEZ, PAULA NATALIA; RISAU GUSMAN, SEBASTIÁN; SAMENGO, INÉS

Congreso; XXVI Anual Meeting SAN; 2021

Abnormal brain asymmetry has been linked to some cognitive and neuropsychiatric disorders. Better knowledge about the normal range of asymmetry improves medical diagnosis. Here we collect and characterize a reference sample from South America (n= 193). Freesurfer was used for segmentation of brains.We model the logarithm of the anatomical measures of each subject as a 186-dimensional random vector. We model the logarithm of the anatomical measures of each subject as a 186-dimensional random vector. We collected a sample of 193 healthy subjects aged 18-60 of both sexes from San Carlos de Bariloche and Buenos Aires, Argentina. We developed a probabilistic graphical model that leads to a conservative description of the structure of correlations between anatomical measures. We recovered asymmetries in the population mean, reported in previous studies. Significant asymmetries in the population mean of a given measure are typically accompanied by a large inter-hemispheric correlation, implying that the asymmetry is also expected at the single-subject level