Hippocampal-cortical connections with high-resolution ex vivo and in vivo diffusion MRI of human brain at 7T

Hippocampus is a critical brain structure associated with many brain functions. The connectivity between hippocampal sub-regions and cerebral cortex hasn’t been fully characterized, and spatial resolution is the key to resolve such connectivity. We utilized 3D high-resolution ex vivo diffusion MRI (dMRI) at 7T to investigate the structure connectivity between hippocampal sub-regions and cortex and compared the results with in vivo data. We found that different sub-regions demonstrated unique fiber projections to cortex, and the high-resolution ex-vivo dMRI resulted in more connections with temporal-occipital lobe and less connections to central gyrus and frontal lobe, compared to lower-resolution in vivo dMRI.