engleski

In Search of the Definitive Brodmann’s Map of Cortical Areas in Human

During the 20th century, many investigators, including Campbell (1903), Brodmann (1909, 1910 ; for review see Judas et al., 2012), Elliot Smith (1907), von Economo and Koskinas (1925), Vogt and Vogt (1926), Bailey and von Bonin (1951), Sarkisov et al. (1955), and others, have produced cytoarchitectural maps of the human cerebral cortex by dividing it into a number of areas or fields. Although many maps have been produced in attempts to make a definitive partition of the human cerebral cortex, Brodmann’s map and especially his numerical system attached to cytoarchitecture is by far the most widely recognized in current use. There is a common agreement that the popularity of Brodmann’s numbering system is due to its simplicity to recall, its relatively sharp delineations of the borders between adjacent areas, its detail not so exhaustive to be impossible to refer to, and the fact that Brodmann’s observations of cytoarchitecture have stood the test of time. In addition, Brodmann’s map is also the closest to the modern definition of the cortical area (field), by which an area, among several other features, is receiving afferent fibers from a particular (principal) nucleus of the thalamus (Jones, 1985, 2009). The trend now appears to be going in the direction of a finer and finer parcellation, akin to that of the Vogts, who described over 200 areas (Vogt and Vogt, 1926), as functional subdivisions are recognized within areas by new techniques such as evoked potentials and microelectrode mapping, receptor autoradiographic mapping (e.g., Palomero- Gallagher et al., 2013), and functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging (e.g., http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/ ; Seung, 2012 ; Van Essen et al., 2013). It can be concluded that such modern imaging studies are uncovering new functional localizations (areal activation “centroids“ in terms of peak voxel coordinates) with hopes that, eventually, molecular-genetic markers will be discovered ultimately to determine a reproducible parcellation of the cerebral cortex on the basis of both structural and functional properties. It will then be safe to say that the definitive Brodmann’s map of the human cerebral cortex is established.

Cerebral cortex; Brodmann’s map; neuroimaging

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