Atlas-based structural disconnectomes are associated to cognitive performance in brain tumors.

Background: Brain tumors are associated with impaired cognitive functioning, which may result from disruptions in brain structural connectivity. Estimating structural disconnections is a more advantageous representation of tumor impact and can be performed indirectly through normative brain atlases.

Materials and methods: Using a publicly available dataset of glioma and meningioma patient MRI scans and tumor masks, latent correlations were estimated between measures of structural disconnection and attention-based cognitive functioning. These measures included gray matter (GM) parcel damage, white matter tract (WMT) damage, GM parcel-to-parcel disconnections, and reaction time (RTI) as part of the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) to assess attention.

Results: Preprocessing pipelines with two different methods of minimizing the pathology impact on MRI normalization were utilized: cost function masking and lesion filling. The results across both pipelines were nearly consistent, with significant correlations mainly found between RTI measures and the damage to left inferior fronto-occipital and uncinate fasciculus, as well as the left prefrontal-visual disconnections.

Conclusions: This alludes to the importance of left-hemispheric prefrontal-visual coupling in attention-based tasks, particularly those involving object- and feature-based attention.