VISUAL CORTEX & RECONSTRUCTIONS & REPRESENTATIONS OF CEREBRAL CORTEX

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Neuroscientists have obtained vast amounts of experimental data about the organization and function of the cerebral cortex in humans and in non-human primates, especially the macaque monkey. To cope with this flood of information, new tools and strategies are necessary in order to adequately analyze and communicate these findings. The objective of our brain-mapping research in collaboration with TRD4 is to develop improved methods for visualizing, analyzing, and communicating information about the cerebral cortex, and to apply these methods to a variety of experimental data sets in humans and nonhuman primates. A central focus of TRD4 involves the development of explicit surface reconstructions to represent the shape of the cortical sheet. The need for cortical surface reconstructions arises from the complex pattern of convolutions of the cerebral cortex, particularly in humans, and from the high degree of individual variability in the pattern of folds. Cortical con volutions and their variability have long been matters of both frustration and fascination to neuroscientists. The frustration arises because the convolutions make it difficult to visualize important spatial relationships and to specify locations on the cortical surface with precision and confidence. The fascination arises because of curiosity about how the convolutions arise during development and what they signify functionally. The major goals of our projects are generating fundus curves on cortical membranes, the anatomical features of deepest curvature of cortical surfaces (TRD4-Aim 3). These provide the landmarks for the development of the new mapping algorithms (TRD4-Aims 2, 5) enabling important functional differences between individuals or across groups with different diagnostic categories to be correlated with differences in cortical structure and the pattern of convolutions. Progress: Spherical diffomeorphic mapping for landmarks have been implemented and debugged. Several brains from Dr. Van Essen's laboratory have now been analyzed, generating the diffeomorphisms corresponding to matching the sulcul boundaries as defined by Dr. Van Essen.