The human cerebral cortex is organized into functionally segregated but synchronized regions connected by the structural connectivity of white matter pathways. While the structure-function coupling has been implicated in cognitive development and neuropsychiatric disorders, it remains unclear to what extent the coupling reflects a group-common characteristic or varies across individuals at global and regional levels. Leveraging two independent, high-quality datasets, we found that the graph neural network predicted unseen individuals9 functional connectivity from structural connectivity more accurately than previous studies, reflecting a strong structure-function coupling. This coupling was primarily driven by network topology and was substantially stronger than linear models. We also found that structure-function coupling was dominated by the group-common effects, with subtle yet significant individual-specific effects. The regional group and individual effects in the coupling were both hierarchically organized across the cortex along a sensorimotor-association cortical axis, with lower group effects and higher individual effects in association cortices. These findings emphasize the importance of considering the group and individual effects in cortical structure-function coupling, suggesting insights into connectivity-guided therapeutics.

Group-common and individual-specific effects of structure-function coupling in human brain networks with graph neural networks