An awesome awesome awesome paper in PLoS Biology that has been getting media attention lately made a valiant attempt to map the brain. Yeah, the whole thing (okay, just cortex). Using Diffuse Spectrum MRI, the researchers constructed an ROI-based network of nodes, between which normalized strength measurements were calculated. No, I'm not sure how they did it exactly (I've only had time to skim the paper), nor could I find what task the people were asked to perform. They may have just asked them to lie there and taken any spontaneous activation, but that would be horribly uncontrolled.
The results point to distinct hubs:
"Based on their aggregated ranking scores across six network measures (Table 1), we identified eight anatomical subregions as members of the structural core. These are the posterior cingulate cortex, the precuneus, the cuneus, the paracentral lobule, the isthmus of the cingulate, the banks of the superior temporal sulcus, and the inferior and superior parietal cortex, all of them in both hemispheres."Check out the paper. (Free to everyone)
I like it so much I made a new desktop background from the images (thumbnails above). Three monitors of cortical map glory!
I have not contacted the authors to see if it is okay for me to post the full size images, but will as soon as I post this. The paper is Creative Commons with no permissions needed, but I like to play it safe.
The zip containing the images is hosted here, but I've passworded it until I get the go ahead from Hagmann et al. And the real images at full size are much much nicer. Remeber that these are probably larger than you need (5120x1200 = 2x 20" 4:3 monitors + 1x 24" 16:9 monitor), so scale and crop accordingly.
3 comments:
this is the coolest thing since last year's adult stem cell craze.
how can one acquire one of the images once/if you get permission to distribute?
Same here :)
Loved the paper...
Guise, it's in PLoS. Anyone can use the images for any reason (provided you cite them).
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