Trends and Properties of Human Cerebral Cortex: Correlations with Cortical Myelin Content

By Matthew F. Glasser, Manu S. Goyal, Todd M. Preuss, Marcus E. Raichle, David C. Van Essen. NeuroImage, 2013

451 citations recorded by the source corpus.

“In vivo Brodmann mapping” or non-invasive cortical parcellation using MRI, especially by measuring cortical myelination, has recently become a popular research topic, though myeloarchitectonic cortical parcellation in humans previously languished in favor of cytoarchitecture. We review recent in vivo myelin mapping studies and discuss some of the different methods for estimating myelin content. We discuss some ways in which myelin maps may improve surface registration and be useful for cross-modal and cross-species comparisons, including some preliminary cross-species results. Next, we consider neurobiological aspects of why some parts of cortex are more myelinated than others. Myelin content is inversely correlated with intracortical circuit complexity—in general, more myelin content means simpler and perhaps less dynamic intracortical circuits. Using existing PET data and functional network parcellations, we examine metabolic differences in the differently myelinated cortical functional networks. Lightly myelinated cognitive association networks tend to have higher aerobic glycolysis than heavily myelinated early sensory-motor ones, perhaps reflecting greater ongoing dynamic anabolic cortical processes. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that intracortical myelination may stabilize intracortical circuits and inhibit synaptic plasticity. Finally, we discuss the future of the in vivo myeloarchitectural field and cortical parcellation--“in vivo Brodmann mapping”--in general.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/14e89f24952be2ac76ed7486602f4877d032b556

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Citations in the corpus

Mathematical framework for large-scale brain network modeling in The Virtual Brain (2015, unknown): “More recent approaches (Glasser and Essen, 2011; Glasser et al., 2013, 2014) will provide a dense connectome, a highdensity mapping of point-to-point (vertex-to-vertex) connections, derived from a subject's cortical surface.”
Parcellations and Connectivity Patterns in Human and Macaque Cerebral Cortex (2016, background): “Figure 2 illustrates population-average maps of myelin content, displayed on inflated atlas surfaces of the macaque and human right hemispheres (Glasser et al. 2013b).”
neuromaps: structural and functional interpretation of brain maps (2022, background): “One cluster contains maps including the T1w/T2w ratio [26], the principal component of gene expression [13, 47], cerebral blood flow, and metabolic glucose uptake [72], whereas the other is composed of maps like the principal functional gradient [46], intersubject functional variability [51], and de”
A multi-modal parcellation of human cerebral cortex (2016, unknown): “Architectural measures of relative cortical myelin content and cortical thickness were derived from T1-weighted (T1w) and T2-weighted (T2w) structural images5,9,10.”
Generative modeling of brain maps with spatial autocorrelation (2020, methodology): “To illustrate the statistical impact of SA in brain maps, we consider two MRI-derived structural neuroimaging maps: the T1w/T2w map, which partly reflects intracortical gray-matter myelin content (Glasser and Van Essen, 2011; Glasser et al., 2014), and the cortical thickness map (Fig.”
The Human Connectome Project’s Neuroimaging Approach (2016, background): “The cerebral cortex, the seat of human cognition, is a folded sheet 1.6–4 mm thick (mean ~2.6 mm) with a surface area of ~1,000 cm 2 per hemisphere 19,39 .”