Atlas-Based Structural Disconnectomes Are Associated with Cognitive Performance in Brain Tumors

<b><i>Background:</i></b> Brain tumors are associated with impaired cognitive functioning, which may result from disruptions in brain structural connectivity. Estimating structural disconnections is a more advantageous representation of tumor impact and can be performed indirectly through normative brain atlases. <b><i>Materials and Methods:</i></b> Using a publicly available dataset of glioma and meningioma patient MRI scans and tumor masks, latent correlations were estimated between measures of structural disconnection and attention-based cognitive functioning. These measures included gray matter (GM) parcel damage, white matter tract damage, GM parcel-to-parcel disconnections, and reaction time (RTI) as part of the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery to assess attention. <b><i>Results:</i></b> Preprocessing pipelines with two different methods of minimizing the pathology impact on MRI normalization were utilized: cost-function masking and lesion filling. The results across both pipelines were nearly consistent, with significant correlations mainly found between RTI measures and the damage to the left inferior fronto-occipital and uncinate fasciculus, as well as the left prefrontal-visual disconnections. <b><i>Conclusions:</i></b> This alludes to the importance of left-hemispheric prefrontal-visual coupling in attention-based tasks, particularly those involving object- and feature-based attention.