Anatomo-functional description of the brain: A probabilistic approach

The acquisition of brain images in fMRI yields rich topographic information about the functional structure of the brain. However, these descriptions are limited by strong inter-subject variability. A recent approach to represent the gross functional architecture across the population as seen in fMRI consists in automatically defining accross-subjects brain parcels. This technique yields large-scale inter-subject correspondences while allowing some spatial relaxation in the alignment of the brains. We address here the open question of an optimal parameterization (number of parcels) of brain parcellations using information theoretic criteria and cross-validation. Moreover, a finer analysis of variance components enables us to better characterize intra- and inter-subject variability sources in parcellation models.