Optimized Signal Separation for 3D-Polarized Light Imaging

“Why should we bother about connectivity in the age of functional imaging, at a time when magnets of ever increasing strength promise to detect the location of even the faintest thought? Isn’t it enough to locate cortical areas engaged in deception, introspection, empathy? Do we really have to worry about their connections? The answer is “yes”. In the case of the nervous system, the unit of relational architecture that allows the whole to exceed the sum of the parts is known as large-scale network. Its elucidation requires an elaborate understanding of connectivity patterns” [1]. Despite considerable advances in experimental techniques and in our understanding of animal anatomy over the last decades, the real connectivity of the human brain has essentially remained a mystery. It is the human brain’s multiscale topology that poses a particular challenge to any neuroimaging technique and prevented the neuroscientists from unraveling the connectome so far.