Researchers Unveil Revolutionary New Template of the Human Brain

The human brain is responsible for important processes such as perception, memory, language, reasoning, awareness, and emotions.

Scientists frequently employ neuroimaging to monitor individuals’ brain activity when doing a task or at rest to understand better how the brain functions. The cerebral cortex, the human brain’s outer layer, systematically organizes brain operations.

Researchers frequently employ a “cortical surface model” to evaluate neuroimaging data and investigate the functional structure of the human brain.

Every brain has a unique form. To evaluate neuroimaging data from many individuals, researchers must first register the data to the same brain template, which allows them to identify the same anatomical region on diverse brains even though brain shapes vary. These sites are referred to as “vertices.”

Over the last 25 years, such templates have undergone various modifications, and today, the most often used cortical surface templates are based on data from 40 brains.

Dartmouth researchers have developed a new cortical surface template called “OpenNeuro Average,” or “onavg,” that improves accuracy and speed when evaluating neuroimaging data.

Nature Methods published the findings.

Our cortical surface template, onavg, is the first to sample different parts of the brain uniformly. It is a less biased map that is more computationally efficient.”

Feilong Ma, Study Lead Author, Postdoctoral Fellow and Member, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College

Using OpenNeuro, a free and open-source platform for sharing neuroimaging data, the researchers created the template based on the cortical structure of 1,031 brains from 30 datasets. According to the co-authors, this is the first cortical surface template based on the brain's geometric form.

In contrast, previous templates sampled different cortex sections unevenly and used a sphere-like shape to designate the position of cortical vertices, resulting in vertice distribution biases.

The onavg template requires fewer data for analysis.

Ma added, “It is very expensive to obtain data through neuroimaging and for some clinical populations— such as if you're studying a rare disease—it can be difficult or impossible to acquire a large amount of data, so the ability to access better results with less data is an asset. With more efficient data usage, our template can potentially increase the replicability and reproducibility of results in academic studies.”

James Haxby, Study Co-Author, Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Former Director at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth added, “I think that onavg represents a methodological advancement that has broad applications across all aspects of cognitive and clinical neuroscience.”

He believed their cortical surface template might be employed in studies on vision, hearing, language, individual variations, autism, and neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Haxby stated, “We think it is going to have a broad and deep impact in the field.”

Maria Ida Gobbini, an associate professor in the Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences at the University of Bologna, and Jiahui Guo, a former postdoctoral fellow in psychological and brain sciences and assistant professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, assisted the study.