Abstract:
In pursuing our work on the organization of human visual cortex,
we wanted to specify more accurately the position of the visual motion
area (area V5) in relation to the sulcal and gyral pattern of the
cerebral cortex. We also wanted to determine the intersubject variation
of area V5 in terms of position and extent of blood flow change in it,
in response to the same task. We therefore used positron emission
tomography (PET) to determine the foci of relative cerebral blood flow
increases produced when subjects viewed a moving checkerboard pattern,
compared to viewing the same pattern when it was stationary. We
coregistered the PET images from each subject with images of the same
brain obtained by magnetic resonance imaging, thus relating the position
of V5 in all 24 hemispheres examined to the individual gyral
configuration of the same brains. This approach also enabled us to
examine the extent to which results obtained by pooling the PET data
from a small group of individuals (e.g., six), chosen at random, would
be representative of a much larger sample in determining the mean
location of V5 after transformation into Talairach coordinates. After
stereotaxic transformation of each individual brain, we found that the
position of area V5 can vary by as much as 27 mm in the left hemisphere
and 18 mm in the right for the pixel with the highest significance for
blood flow change. There is also an intersubject variability in blood
flow change within it in response to the same visual task. V5
nevertheless bears a consistent relationship, within each brain, to the
sulcal pattern of the occipital lobe. It is situated ventrolaterally,
just posterior to the meeting point of the ascending limb of the
inferior temporal sulcus and the lateral occipital sulcus. In position
it corresponds almost precisely with Flechsig's Feld 16, one of the
areas that he found to be myelinated at birth