Linking contemporary high resolution magnetic resonance imaging to the von economo legacy: A study on the comparison of MRI cortical thickness and histological measurements of cortical structure

摘要

The cerebral cortex is a distinctive part of the mammalian nervous system, displaying a spatial variety in cyto‐, chemico‐, and myelinoarchitecture. As part of a rich history of histological findings, pioneering anatomists von Economo and Koskinas provided detailed mappings on the cellular structure of the human cortex, reporting on quantitative aspects of cytoarchitecture of cortical areas. Current day investigations into the structure of human cortex have embraced technological advances in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to assess macroscale thickness and organization of the cortical mantle in vivo. However, direct comparisons between current day MRI estimates and the quantitative measurements of early anatomists have been limited. Here, we report on a simple, but nevertheless important cross‐analysis between the histological reports of von Economo and Koskinas on variation in thickness of the cortical mantle and MRI derived measurements of cortical thickness. We translated the von Economo cortical atlas to a subdivision of the commonly used Desikan–Killiany atlas (as part of the FreeSurfer Software package and a commonly used parcellation atlas in studies examining MRI cortical thickness). Next, values of “width of the cortical mantle” as provided by the measurements of von Economo and Koskinas were correlated to cortical thickness measurements derived from high‐resolution anatomical MRI T1 data of 200+ subjects of the Human Connectome Project (HCP). Cross‐correlation revealed a significant association between group‐averaged MRI measurements of cortical thickness and histological recordings (  = 0.54,  r = 0.62,  Hum Brain Mapp 36:3038–3046, 2015. ©