Architectonic mapping of the medial region of the human orbitofrontal cortex by density profiles

The study of architectonic differentiation in the cortex is advanced by the articulation of objective definitions based on clear features of the cortical architecture. We adopted areal density profiles as a means of sampling the cortex. On the profiles, we isolated and quantified the density of individual cortical layers. These features may serve as criteria in objective definitions in a way that builds on qualitative observations found in the classical literature. A preprocessing procedure was introduced to overcome artefacts in the density profiles caused by the partial overlap of neighboring neuronal layers and cortical folding. We applied this method to the medial half of the orbital frontal cortex in specimens drawn from 10 human postmortem brain hemispheres. The measurements successfully confirmed the existence of several qualitatively observed areas (architectonic areas 14c, 14r, 11m, 11 and 13). The selection of specific sampling parameters was justified on the basis of simultaneous measurements of the cortical morphology which demonstrate its influence on the appearance of the cortical layers. We also examined the robustness of the measuring procedure by analyzing the outcome of varying systematically the sampling parameters. We describe here a novel method of sampling the cortex for architectonic analysis and demonstrate its application on histological sections obtained from the medial half of the human orbitofrontal cortex.