Using tractography to infer Basal ganglia´s functional subterritories distribution change in Huntington disease

The striatum including the caudate and putamen nuclei is involved in numerous functional tasks. It ensures senso-rimotor, associative and limbic functions supported by sensorimo-tor, associative and limbic sub-territories directly connected to the cortex and that may overlap. Damage to the striatum results in movement disorders like in Parkinson´s disease or Huntington´s disease. In this study, we propose to measure the proportion of each associative, limbic and sensorimotor subterritory inside each nucleus of the striatum using its connectivity to homologeous cortical regions. We then compare these proportions between healthy subjects and Huntington patients in order to better characterize the distribution of the atrophy inside each of the striatum nuclei.