Reconstructions and Representations of Cerebral Cortex

项目描述（由申请人提供）：本项目将对人类和非人类灵长类动物大脑皮层的组织、连接和进化关系产生广泛的新发现。它还将通过建立一个用户友好的数据库来传播研究结果，该数据库可随时查阅高分辨率地图集、参考数据和经过广泛处理的已出版数据集。这将使研究人员能够将他们的结果与参考数据进行比较，并提供一个平台来分享他们自己的结果。总之，这些努力将加速了解人类大脑回路在健康和疾病方面的进展。第一个目标是获得更准确的猕猴解剖连通性图，并将解剖连通性与基于扩散成像MRI扫描间接估计连通性的神经束造影方法进行比较。现有的数据集，包括数十个逆行示踪剂注射，在数字化组织切片上绘制，将被映射到一个高分辨率的数据集上

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will generate extensive new findings about the organization, connectivity, and evolutionary relationships of cerebral cortex in humans and nonhuman primates. It will also disseminate the results by establishing a user-friendly database that provides ready access to high-resolution atlases, reference data, and extensively processed published datasets. This will enable investigators to compare their results with the reference data and provide a platform to share their own results. Taken together, these efforts will accelerate progress in understanding human brain circuits in health and disease. The first aim is to obtain more accurate maps of anatomical connectivity in the macaque monkey and to compare anatomical connectivity with tractography methods that indirectly estimate connectivity based on diffusion imaging MRI scans. An existing dataset, involving dozens of retrograde tracer injections charted on digitized histological sections, will be mapped onto a high-resolution macaque atlas. This will yield quantitative maps of 'ground truth' neuroanatomical connectivity with unprecedented accuracy. Comparing tracer-based maps with results from tractography applied to postmortem macaque brains, will provide an objective analysis of how well tractography estimates anatomical connection strengths. The second aim will compare cortical organization and connectivity in humans to that in the macaque monkey and also our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. Surface-based registration between species will be used to evaluate candidate evolutionary homologies between cortical areas and to compare connectivity patterns between macaque and human. Chimpanzee cortex will be compared to human and macaque cortex using myelin maps as a common marker of cortical architecture. These analyses will better characterize regions of rapid evolutionary expansion in the human lineage. The third aim will establish and help populate a new database, the Brain Analysis Library of Spatial maps and Atlases (BALSA). BALSA will include a curated, up-to-date repository of reference data accurately mapped to atlas surfaces and volumes, plus a library for sharing extensively analyzed datasets associated with published studies, as voluntarily submitted by authors. BALSA will have user-friendly features that enable easy data uploading and facilitate browsing, searching, web-based visualization, and downloading datasets of interest.