Evolutionarily-preserved consistent gyral folding patterns across primate brains

Abstract

Cortical folding pattern analysis has attracted significant interest recently due to its significance in understanding the structure and function of the brain. While most previous studies focused on the human brain, the regularity and variability of cortical folding patterns across primate brains such as macaques and chimpanzees are largely unknown. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper develops and applies a novel computational framework to identify evolutionarily-preserved consistent cortical gyral folding patterns across macaque, chimpanzee and human brains based on diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data. Particularly, we identified six evolutionarily-preserved 3-hinge gyral folds that exhibit both consistent anatomical locations and consistent white matter fiber connection patterns across the above mentioned three species of primate brains, suggesting that these six 3-hinge gyral folds might be an important component of the evolutionarily-preserved structural cortical architectures across primate brains. Our work offers novel insights into the regularity and variability of the cerebral cortex and can potentially facilitate novel neuroimage analyses such as inter-subject registration in the future.