Endophrenology: new statistical techniques for studies of brain form. Life on the hyphen in neuro-informatics

The interweaving here of statistics, image analysis, and neuroscience is a fine example of how neuro-informatics is more than the concentration of its constituent disciplines. Each of the component tools of the morphometric synthesis--the deformation model, Procrustes shape coordinates, the thin-plate spline--gains greatly in power in the context of the others, and enhances, too, great recent strides in the instrumentation leading to the raw image data itself (MR scanner physics, multiple stains, new contrast agents). The modern morphometric tool kit seems better matched to the description of gross brain variation than we had any reason to expect. Now the new tools can be exploited to produce remarkably sharper new findings. At the same time, the demands of neuro-informatics will press the toolmakers to provide equivalently powerful new techniques in areas presently less developed, such as cortical form or correlations of images with parametric experimental designs or with clinical histories.