Neocortical Functional Hierarchy Estimated from Connectomic Morphology in the Mouse Brain

The mechanisms of information processing in the neocortex underlie brain functions based on the hierarchy of individual cortical areas. This study was focused on the determination of the neocortical hierarchy resulting from a clustering analysis of connectomic morphology with cortical layer resolution. K-means clustering effectively classified connectivities into two groups. Moreover, the description of the neocortical hierarchy was simplified to a wiring diagram to understand how sensory information flows in the biological neural networks. In this initial work, the validity of the resulting classification is still uncertain to describe the hierarchical relationships in the neocortex.