Chinese scholars have made progress in the research of Chinese-brain connectome and its big data resources

Figure: Comparison of Chinese and Western brain function activation maps

With the funding of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers: 81790650, 81727808), Professor Gao Jiahong's team of Peking University has made progress
in the research of Chinese brain connectome and its big data resources 。 The findings, titled "Increasing diversity in Chinese connectomics with the Chinese Human Connectome Project," were published online in Nature on December 19, 2022.
The journal
Nature Neuroscience.
Link to the paper: _istranslated="1">.

Human beings live in
a world of diversity.
Long-standing research has found that the human brain and behavior are shaped by genes, environment and culture and their interactions, but the mechanisms of this influence have not been systematically explored and studied
.
In recent years, the rapid progress of cutting-edge neuroimaging technology methods has promoted the generation and fusion exploration of multimodal brain imaging large datasets, and allowed the academic community to deeply explore the macrostructure and functional connectome architecture of the human brain, bringing new inspiration and ideas
to many interesting and important scientific questions including the above topics.

The research team launched the Chinese Chinese Human Connectome Project (CHCP) in 2017 to establish a new set of open resources for Chinese brain imaging, including large multimodal neuroimaging, behavioral and genetic datasets
of Chinese populations 。 In order to facilitate control and comparison, CHCP is highly consistent with the research protocols of the Human Connectome Project (HCP) in the United States: including magnetic resonance imaging scanning, data acquisition parameters, task paradigms for functional brain imaging, etc.
; At the same time, CHCP also collected behavioral and genetic data
comparable to the HCP dataset.
At present, research based on the large dataset of CHCP and HCP has preliminarily found that the characteristics of brain structure, brain function and brain connection coexist
with personality in people with different cultural backgrounds.
In addition, the population brain maps based on the two sets of large datasets had high reproducibility, while cross-cultural comparisons showed the greatest difference in the relevant brain mechanisms of language processing (Figure).

At present, the CHCP big data set has been openly shared
.
The publication of the research results and data resources of the CHCP Chinese Brain Connectome Program is not only of great significance for promoting scientific research on brain-behavior and brain mapping based on Chinese brain images, but more importantly, it fills the gap in the current international lack of control from non-Western groups (such as Chinese groups), and promotes the exploration of brain-behavior associations in different cultural and ethnic backgrounds of human beings
.