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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

Front. Syst. Neurosci.
Volume 18 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2024.1417346

The Neuroanatomical Organization of the Hypothalamus is Driven by Spatial and Topological Efficiency

Provisionally accepted
Nathan R. Smith Nathan R. Smith 1Shabeeb Ameen Shabeeb Ameen 2Sierra N. Miller Sierra N. Miller 3James M. Kasper James M. Kasper 4J. M. Schwarz J. M. Schwarz 2Ahmad Borzou Ahmad Borzou 5Jonathan Hommel Jonathan Hommel 4*
  • 1 Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, United States
  • 2 Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, United States
  • 3 University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, United States
  • 4 Center for Addiction Research, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas, United States
  • 5 CompuFlair, Houston, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The hypothalamus in the mammalian brain is responsible for regulating functions associated with survival and reproduction representing a complex set of highly interconnected, yet anatomically and functionally distinct, sub-regions. It remains unclear what factors drive the spatial organization of sub-regions within the hypothalamus. One potential factor may be structural connectivity of the network that promotes efficient function with well-connected sub-regions placed closer together geometrically, i.e., the strongest axonal signal transferred through the shortest geometrical distance. To empirically test for such efficiency, we use hypothalamic data derived from the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas, which provides a structural connectivity map of mouse brain regions derived from a series of viral tracing experiments. Using both cost function minimization and comparison with a weighted, sphere-packing ensemble, we demonstrate that the sum of the distances between hypothalamic sub-regions are not close to the minimum possible distance, consistent with prior whole brain studies. However, if such distances are weighted by the inverse of the magnitude of the connectivity, their sum is among the lowest possible values. Specifically, the hypothalamus appears within the top 94th percentile of neural efficiencies of randomly packed configurations and within one standard deviation of the median efficiency when packings are optimized for maximal neural efficiency. Our results, therefore, indicate that a combination of geometrical and topological constraints help govern the structure of the hypothalamus.

    Keywords: connectome, Graph Theory - graph algorithms; trees, Hypothalamus, Computational Biology, Efficiency, Monte - Carlo simulation, connectivity, Allen Brain Atlas

    Received: 14 Apr 2024; Accepted: 18 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Smith, Ameen, Miller, Kasper, Schwarz, Borzou and Hommel. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jonathan Hommel, Center for Addiction Research, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, 77555, Texas, United States

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