Connectome map more than doubles human cortex’s known regions

NIH | JULY 24, 2016

Researchers have mapped 180 distinct areas in our brain’s outer mantle, or cortex – more than twice the number previously known. They have also developed software that automatically detects the “fingerprint” of each of these areas in an individual’s brain scans.

The researchers discovered that our brain’s cortex, or outer mantle, is composed of 180 distinct areas per hemisphere. For example, the image above shows areas connected to the three main senses – hearing (red), touch (green) vision (blue) and opposing cognitive systems (light and dark). Image credit: Matthew Glasser, Ph.D., and David Van Essen, Ph.D., Washington University

This software correctly mapped the areas by incorporating data from multiple non-invasive brain imaging measures that corroborated each other.

The new study identified – with a nearly 97 percent detection rate – 97 new cortex areas per hemisphere, in addition to confirming 83 that were previously known.

Earlier studies of cortex organization often used just one measure, such as examining postmortem tissue with a microscope. Uncertain delineation of cortex areas has sometimes led to shaky comparability of brain imaging findings.

The Human Connectome Project (HCP) team set out to banish this blurriness by using multiple, precisely aligned, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) modalities to measure cortical architecture, activity, connectivity, and topography in a group of 210 healthy participants.

These measures – including cortex thickness, cortex myelin content, task and resting-state functional MRI (fMRI) – cross-validated each other. The findings were, in turn, confirmed in an additional independent sample of 210 healthy participants.

Even though some cortex areas turned out to be atypically located in a small minority of subjects, the data-derived algorithms incorporated into the software were able to successfully map them.

While the study included fMRI scans of subjects performing tasks, the researchers determined that resting-state MRI techniques should suffice to map the areas in future studies using the tools they developed. Some areas may turn out to have further subdivisions or be subunits of other areas, in light of new data.

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