The need for hemispheric separation in pairwise structural disconnection studies

Abstract The development of new approaches indirectly measuring the structural disconnectome has recently led to an increase in studies investigating pairwise structural disconnections following brain damage. Previous studies jointly analyzed patients with left hemispheric and patients with right hemispheric lesions when investigating a behavior of interest. An alternative approach would be to perform analyses separated by hemisphere, which has been applied in only a minority of studies to date. The present simulation study investigated whether joint or separate analyses (or both equally) are appropriate to reveal the ground truth disconnections. In fact, both approaches resulted in very different patterns of disconnection. In contrast to analyses separated by hemisphere, joint analyses introduced a bias to the disadvantage of intra-hemispheric disconnections. Intra-hemispheric disconnections were statistically underpowered in the joint analysis and thus surpassed the significance threshold with more difficulty compared to inter-hemispheric disconnections. This statistical imbalance was also shown by a greater number of significant inter-hemispheric than significant intra-hemispheric disconnections. This bias from joint analyses is based on mechanisms similar to those underlying the ‘partial injury problem’. We therefore conclude that pairwise structural disconnections in patients with unilateral left hemispheric and with unilateral right hemispheric lesions exhibiting a specific behavior (or disorder) of interest should be studied separately by hemisphere rather than in a joint analysis.