Whole brain atlas with cerebellum WM+GM for functional connectomics?

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Dear community,

I have a question in relation to functional connectomics involving cerebellum.

There is an article recently published in Nature which involves gray and white matter involving only cerebellum. A multimodal submillimeter MRI atlas of the human cerebellum | Scientific Reports (A multimodal submillimeter MRI atlas of the human cerebellum | Scientific Reports).

I wonder if that can be combined on top of any other cortical atlas or if if it's useful at all for my purpose which is only functional connectomics not structural?

Thank you for your helpful response in advance as usual.

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Hi @andraderenew

Currently, in Brainstorm, you can include the cerebellum as part of the cortex for source and connectivity analysis in the source space. Whether this inclusion is appropriate depends on your study's goals and hypotheses about the cerebellum's role in your data or analysis. For instance, if you suspect significant cerebellar involvement in functional networks, incorporating it in source analysis could be valuable.

I wonder if that can be combined on top of any other cortical atlas

This is doable; you can combine atlases.
There are some previous works on combining multiple atlases (uscbrain and brainnetome atlas):

@Anand_Joshi can provide more details on those.

I never tried it in Brainstorm yet, but I'm sure @Raymundo.Cassani has something to add here!

Is it useful at all for my purpose, which is only functional connectomics, not structural?

The usefulness of structural data depends on your study's goals and hypotheses. For functional EEG connectomics, structural data like MRI is often essential in the initial steps to create individualized head models for source localization. This improves the accuracy of functional connectivity analyses. However, if your study focuses only on sensor-level connectivity, structural data may not be critical. Functional and structural modalities are interconnected, but the specific need for structural data depends on the level of spatial precision your analysis requires.