Functional neuroimaging is an essential tool for neuroscience research. However, post-processing is not standardized. While several options for post-processing exist, they tend not to support output from disparate pre-processing pipelines, may have limited documentation, and may not follow BIDS best practices. Here we present XCP-D, which presents a solution to these issues.

Network neuroscience is principally concerned with studying the connectome, the complete description of whole brain connectivity. This connectome is often encoded as a graph of nodes interconnected by edges that can be defined across multiple scales, species, and data modalities. In any case, these descriptions of brain connectivity give rise to complex topology, and understanding how this topology shapes and constrains the brain’s rich repertoire of dynamics is a central goal of network neuroscience. NCT provides a simple yet powerful approach to studying these dynamics that yields insights into how they emerge from this topology.

We evaluate the overarching hypothesis that structural connections between the thalamus and cortex help to coordinate cortical maturational heterochronicity during youth. We first introduce, cortically annotate, and anatomically validate a new atlas of human thalamocortical connections using diffusion tractography. By applying this atlas to three independent youth datasets (ages 8-23 years; total N = 2,676), we reproducibly demonstrate that thalamocortical connections develop along a maturational gradient that aligns with the cortex’s sensorimotor-association axis. Associative cortical regions with thalamic connections that take longest to mature exhibit protracted expression of neurochemical, structural, and functional markers indicative of higher circuit plasticity as well as heightened environmental sensitivity. This work highlights a central role for the thalamus in the orchestration of hierarchically organized and environmentally sensitive windows of cortical developmental malleability.