Systematic findings on the functional connectome of chemosensory perception.

Oral presentation

Robert Pellegrino ¹, Michael Farruggia ^{2, 3}, Dustin Scheinost ^{2, 4, 5, 6}

¹ Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA, ² Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, Yale University, 333 Cedar Street, New Haven, CT, 06510, U.S., ³ Department of Psychiatry, Division of Nutritional Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, 300 George Street, New Haven, CT, 06511, U.S, ⁴ Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Yale School of Medicine, United States, ⁵ Department of Statistics & Data Science, Yale University, United States, ⁶ Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine, United States

Connectivity approaches are needed to understand chemosensory neuronal processes via functional mechanisms and interactions between related brain regions. Chemosensory perception arises from three distinct senses that interact with external chemical information, smell, taste and chemesthesis. Several systematic reviews exist for each modality, even multisensory percepts like flavor, showing related brain regions; however, reviews to date have only focused on spotlight analysis rather than functional connectivity. Here, we provide a systematic review of chemosensory studies using connectivity techniques of regional or brain-wired connectivity to define functional networks in the brain. We use a proof of concept analysis, Connectome-based Predictive Modeling (CPM), to show how connectivity considering a large-scale network can reveal novel insights regarding taste processing in particular. Lastly, we discuss the need for researchers to openly publish data and methods to increase accuracy and generalization of models developed using functional connectivity.