A new myeloarchitectonic map of the human neocortex based on data from the Vogt-Vogt school.

The human cerebral cortex contains numerous myelinated fibres, the arrangement and density of which is by no means homogeneous throughout the cortex. Local differences in the spatial organization of these fibres render it possible to recognize areas with a different myeloarchitecture. The neuroanatomical subdiscipline aimed at the identification and delineation of such areas is known as myeloarchitectonics. During the period extending from 1910 to 1970, Oscar and Cécile Vogt and their numerous collaborators (The Vogt-Vogt school) published a large number of myeloarchitectonic studies on the cortex of the various lobes of the human cerebrum. Recently, one of us (Nieuwenhuys in Brain Struct Funct 218: 303-352, 2013) extensively reviewed these studies. It was concluded that the data available are adequate and sufficient for the composition of a myeloarchitectonic map of the entire human neocortex. The present paper is devoted to the creation of this map. Because the data provided by the Vogt-Vogt school are derived from many different brains, a standard brain had to be introduced to which all data available could be transferred. As such, the colin27 structural scan, aligned to the MNI305 template was selected. The procedure employed in this transfer involved computer-aided transformations of the lobar maps available in the literature, to the corresponding regions of the standard brain, as well as local adjustments in the border zones of the various lobes. The resultant map includes 180 myeloarchitectonic areas, 64 frontal, 30 parietal, 6 insular, 17 occipital and 63 temporal. The designation of the various areas with simple Arabic numbers, introduced by Oscar Vogt for the frontal and parietal cortices, has been extended over the entire neocortex. It may be expected that combination of the myeloarchitectonic data of the Vogt-Vogt school, as expressed in our map, with the results of the detailed cytoarchitectonic and receptor architectonic studies of Karl Zilles and Katrin Amunts and their numerous associates, will yield a comprehensive 'supermap' of the structural organization of the human neocortex. For the time being, i. e., as long as this 'supermap' is not yet available, our map may provide a tentative frame of reference for (a) the morphological interpretation of the results of functional neuroimaging studies; (b) the selection of starting points (seed voxels, regions-of-interest) in diffusion tractography studies and (c) the interpretation of putative myeloarchitectonic features, visualized by in vivo and ex vivo mappings of the cerebral cortex with high-field magnetic resonance imaging.