Nature Neuroscience | released the research results of the Chinese Brain Connectome Program and its big data resources for the first time

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.

On December 20, 2022, the team of Gao Jiahong of Peking University published the research results of the Chinese brain connectome project entitled "Increasing diversity in connectomics with the Chinese Human Connectome Project" and its related work on big data resources in the journal Nature Neuroscience
。 This study establishes a new set of open resources for Chinese brain imaging and reveals the systematic differences
between Chinese and Western brain structure and functional organization information at a large scale.

The results and its big data resources come from the "Chinese Human Connectome Project Chinese" (CHCP)
initiated and preliminarily completed by Gao Jiahong's team.
CHCP aims to establish a large multimodal neuroimaging, behavioral and genetic dataset
based on Chinese population.
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 1: Comparison results of large-scale brain function maps in China and the West

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 plays a role
in exploring brain-behavior associations in different cultural and ethnic backgrounds of human beings 。 Based on the resting functional magnetic resonance image data of CHCP and HCP, the Chinese and Western large-scale 7 network brain function maps showed that the Chinese and Western resting brain function maps showed greater topographic map differences in the joint cortical areas involved in advanced cognitive processing, while the topographic map differences in the primary perceptual cortex were relatively low (Figure 1).

。 Further analysis showed that the differences in brain function activation between CHCP and HCP in the seven classical cognitive task states were mainly reflected in the language processing task, while the brain activation map results related to simple motor function showed lower differences between China and the West (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Comparison results of Chinese and Western brain function activation maps under seven classical cognitive task states

The co-first authors of the paper are Ge Jianqiao, a lecturer at the Institute of Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies of Peking University, Yang Guoyuan, assistant professor of the Institute of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences of Beijing Institute of Technology, and Professor Gao Jiahong of Peking University as the corresponding author
.
Changping Laboratory, Beijing Brain Science and Brain-like Research Center and Beijing Normal University cooperated to participate in the project research
.
The research work of Gao Jiahong Laboratory is funded and supported
by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission and the Beijing Brain Science and Brain-like Research Center.

Link to the original article of the paper: