Atlases of the human brain: Tools for functional neuroimaging

Abstract

Human brain atlases are frequently used tools for the analysis of data from functional imaging and neurophysiology studies. This chapter briefly reviews historical, two- and three-dimensional printed and electronic atlas systems. It emphasizes several key aspects of such atlases: spatial relationships of macro- and microstructures, their intersubject variability, definition of reference brains and spatial reference systems, linear and nonlinear registration procedures of data sets of individual brains to reference brains, and multimodal comparisons of structural and functional data in stereotaxic space. The Appendix outlines the method of generation of probabilistic cytoarchitectonic maps, and provides addresses of some of the electronic human brain atlases and software.