Correspondences between retinotopic areas and myelin maps in human visual cortex

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Human Visual Cortex Mapping
• Brain Atlasing

Background:

• Retinotopic mapping precisely delineates visual areas in individual brains.
• Accurate inter-subject registration is crucial for creating standardized brain atlases.
• Understanding the relationship between functional areas and structural properties like myelination is key.

Purpose of the Study:

• To generate probabilistic and maximum probability maps (MPMs) for 18 retinotopic visual areas.
• To evaluate different inter-subject registration methods for creating these maps.
• To compare retinotopic maps with cortical myelin content and cytoarchitectonic areas.

Main Methods:

• Generated probabilistic area maps and MPMs for 18 retinotopic areas.
• Employed four distinct inter-subject registration techniques, favoring a multimodal surface matching method.
• Compared resulting maps with myelin content estimations and established cytoarchitectonic atlases.

Main Results:

• The multimodal surface matching method yielded the best MPMs with smooth borders and accurate average area sizes.
• Established correspondences between specific retinotopic areas (V1-V3, MT cluster, V3D) and myelination patterns.
• Found agreement between retinotopic and cytoarchitectonic boundaries for early visual areas (V1-V3) but divergence in later areas.

Conclusions:

• Retinotopic mapping offers a finer parcellation of the human visual cortex than cytoarchitectonic methods in certain regions.
• The developed atlas datasets, including retinotopic and myelin density maps, are publicly available.
• These resources will aid future studies investigating the human visual cortex.