Geometric influences on the regional organization of the mammalian brain

COEX 

Since Brodmann's seminal work [1], studies have aimed to divide the brain into spatially contiguous areas or parcels that are functionally or anatomically homogeneous. These parcellations have historically been based on histology, but recent works have derived them by combining neuroimaging with sophisticated algorithms [2,3]. However, current approaches are not generalizable and offer no insight into the generative mechanisms that may have shaped the regional organization of the brain.

Here, we draw on evidence that regional patterning in the brain is strongly shaped by geometrically constrained gradients of gene expression [4] to develop a novel parcellation approach using the eigenmodes of brain geometry [5]. We show that the resulting geometry-derived parcellations are more homogeneous across hundreds of diverse anatomical, functional, cellular, and molecular properties than many existing parcellations of human, non-human primate, and mouse brains.