Madan on "Cortical Cartography"

Guest Lecture: Christopher Madan (Nottingham)

 

"Cortical Cartography: Characterising the peaks and valleys of the cerebral cortex"

 

Abstract: The most defining feature of the human brain is its folding structure; the underlying principle of these cortical folds has been a long-standing topic of investigation and continues to be a mystery. Despite this, there are general inter-individual consistencies in the macroscopic organization of cortical folds, and these consistencies form the basis of use of cortical parcellation atlases. Standard measures of cortical morphology, however, often quantify volumetric properties of the cortex (i.e., volume, thickness, surface area) rather than shape-related characteristics. In this talk I will be discussing more novel, shape-related measures of cortical morphology, with a particular emphasis on fractal dimensionality, a measure of structural complexity. A series of recent findings examining age-related differences in brain morphology will be presented, along with pilot work extending these methods to dementia and non-human primates.