Jennifer Andrea McNab1,
Jonathan R. Polimeni1,
1A.A. Martinos
Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General
Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; 2Harvard-MIT
Division of Health Sciences & Technology, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
We present a surface-based analysis that characterizes the principal diffusion eigenvectors from 1 mm isotropic diffusion measurements relative to the cortical surface normal. We investigate DTI changes as a function of cortical depth, surface curvature and partial volume effects. We find that much of the cortex is predominately radial, but replicate the finding that S1 cortex is strongly tangential. Cortical regions S2 and A1 share S1s tangential orientation. The ability to parcellate folded cortex by diffusion metrics provides new possibilities for studying brain organization as it relates to function in the healthy and diseased brain.