Role of Mechanical Factors in the Morphology of the Primate Cerebral Cortex

By Claus C. Hilgetag, Helen Barbas. PLoS Comput. Biol., 2006

311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The convoluted cortex of primates is instantly recognizable in its principal morphologic features, yet puzzling in its complex finer structure. Various hypotheses have been proposed about the mechanisms of its formation. Based on the analysis of databases of quantitative architectonic and connection data for primate prefrontal cortices, we offer support for the hypothesis that tension exerted by corticocortical connections is a significant factor in shaping the cerebral cortical landscape. Moreover, forces generated by cortical folding influence laminar morphology, and appear to have a previously unsuspected impact on cellular migration during cortical development. The evidence for a significant role of mechanical factors in cortical morphology opens the possibility of constructing computational models of cortical develoment based on physical principles. Such models are particularly relevant for understanding the relationship of cortical morphology to the connectivity of normal brains, and structurally altered brains in diseases of developmental origin, such as schizophrenia and autism.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Geometry and Topology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/35f5b4848aaeeedd2f6ad3b0708e6a4685e42592

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Citations in the corpus

Small-world anatomical networks in the human brain revealed by cortical thickness from MRI. (2007, background): “physical principle have been proposed to understand the relationship of cortical morphology and the connectivity of normal brains (Hilgetag and Barbas 2006).”
Nonoptimal Component Placement, but Short Processing Paths, due to Long-Distance Projections in Neural Systems (2006, background): “For instance, only about 15% of the connections among prefrontal cortices in the Macaque monkey possess strongly curved trajectories, and dense fibres, in particular, tend to be completely straight [22].”
Anatomically motivated modeling of cortical laminae (2014, methodology): “The folding pattern was explained using the idea of white matter axonal tension (Van Essen, 1997), an idea supported by modeling cortico-cortical connections (Hilgetag and Barbas, 2006).”
A role for intermediate radial glia in the tangential expansion of the mammalian cerebral cortex. (2011, methodology): “Tension forces and hydraulic pressures have been proposed as strong candidates (Caviness 1975; Van Essen 1997; Toro and Burnod 2005; Hilgetag and Barbas 2006).”
Laminar analysis of 7 T BOLD using an imposed spatial activation pattern in human V1 (2010, unknown): “…folding pattern—that upper layers are consistently thinner within the crests of cortical gyri, and the lower layers are thinner within the fundi of cortical sulci has been demonstrated in both macaque (Van Essen and Maunsell, 1980; Hilgetag and Barbas, 2006) and human (Fatterpekar et al., 2003).”