The human brain is responsible for critical functions, including perception, memory, language, thinking, consciousness, and emotions. To understand how the brain works, scientists often use neuroimaging to record participants' brain activity when the brain is performing a task or at rest. Brain functions are systematically organized on the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the human brain.
Researchers often use what is called a "cortical surface model" to analyze neuroimaging data and study the functional organization of the human brain. Each brain has a different shape. To analyze neuroimaging data of multiple individuals, researchers need to register the data to the same brain template, which enables identifying the same anatomical location on different brains, even though brains have different shapes.
These locations are known as "vertices." Over the past 25 years, there have been several iterations of such templates, and the most commonly used cortical surface templates today are based on data collected from 40 brains. Now, Dartmouth researchers have created a new cortical surface template called "OpenNeuro Average," or "onavg" for short, which provides greater accuracy and efficiency in analyzing neuroimaging data.
The findings are published in Nature Methods . "Our cortical surface template, onavg, is the first to sample different parts of the brain uniformly," says lead author Feilong Ma, a postdoctoral fellow and member of the Haxby Lab in the Department of Psycholo.