A probabilistic atlas of the human motion complex built from large‐scale functional localizer data

Abstract

Accurate motion perception is critical to dealing with the changing dynamics of our visual world. A cluster known as the human MT+ complex (hMT+) has been identified as a core region involved in motion perception. Several atlases defined based on cytoarchitecture, retinotopy, connectivity, and multimodal features include homologs of the hMT+. However, an hMT+ atlas defined directly based on this region's response for motion is still lacking. Here, we identified the hMT+ based on motion responses from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) localizer data in 509 participants and then built a probabilistic atlas of the hMT+. As a result, four main findings were revealed. First, the hMT+ showed large interindividual variability across participants. Second, the atlases stabilized when the number of participants used to build the atlas was more than 100. Third, the functional hMT+ showed good agreement with the hMT+ atlases built based on cytoarchitecture, retinotopy, and connectivity, suggesting a good structural–functional correspondence. Fourth, tests on multiple fMRI data sets acquired from independent participants, imaging parameters and paradigms revealed that the functional hMT+ showed higher sensitivity than all other atlases in ROI analysis except that connectivity and multimodal hMT+ atlases in the left hemisphere could infrequently attain comparable sensitivity to the functional atlas. Taken together, our findings reveal the benefit of using large‐scale functional localizer data to build a reliable and representative hMT+ atlas. Our atlas is freely available for download; it can be used to localize the hMT+ in individual participants when functional localizer data are not available.

A probabilistic functional atlas of human occipito-temporal visual cortex

“…Finding that our approach generates similar ROIs to other atlases (e.g., V1-V3 in the Wang et al (2014) atlas, Benson et al (2012) atlas) and hMT+ (Huang et al 2019) is important as it illustrates that these ROIs are robust to experimental design, stimuli type, and number of subjects that were used for generating atlases, all of which varied across studies. For example, we defined hMT+ by contrasting responses to expanding and contracting low contrast concentric rings to stationary ones in 19 subjects but Huang et al (2019) defined hMT+ by contrasting responses to dots moving in several directions vs. stationary dots in 509 subjects. Despite these differences,…”

“…To compare our atlas to the Benson atlas where there is no separation between ventral and dorsal quarterfields, we merged our dorsal and ventral V1-V3. Additionally, there is a published probabilistic atlas of CoS-places (Weiner et al 2018), and motion selective hMT+ (Huang et al 2019). We compared our surface visfAtlas to the existing surface maps by assessing their correspondence in the FreeSurfer fsaverage space.…”

“…8E). On lateral occipitotemporal cortex we compared a recently published motion selective group area of hMT+ that has been defined using data from 509 adults (Huang et al 2019).As Huang's et al (2019) group fROI was not bounded by body-selective regions but ours was defined by maximum probability map (MPM) that takes into account the neighboring face and body-part areas, the visfAtlas is smaller than Huang's definition Nonetheless, also here, the locus of our hMT+ probabilistic map is within the hMT+ atlas published by Huang et al (2019).…”

“…To overcome these limitations, progress in the field of cognitive neuroscience has led to the development of cortical atlases, which allow localization of visual areas in new subjects by leveraging ROI data from an independent set of typical participants (Frost and Goebel 2012; ventral-temporal cortex category selectivity: Julian et al 2012;Engell and McCarthy 2013;Zhen et al 2017a;Weiner et al 2018; visual field maps: Benson et al 2012;Wang et al 2014; motion-selective hMT: Huang et al 2019;multimodal parcellation: Glasser et al 2016; cytoarchitectonic parcellation of ventral visual cortex: Rosenke et al 2018). In addition to providing independent means to identify ROIs, this approach enables quantification of between-subject variability.…”

Guiding functional near-infrared spectroscopy optode-layout design using individual (f)MRI data: Effects on signal quality and sensitivity

“…In view of these observations, we encourage researchers to use individual functional and anatomical data for designing optode layouts when possible, but when anatomical data is available and functional data is not, probabilistic functional maps constitute a promising and economic alternative. FMRI-based probabilistic functional maps of the human ventral occipital cortex 93 , human motion complex 94 , face selective areas 95,96 , finger dominance in the primary somatosensory cortex 97 or across the whole cortex 36 are freely available or available on demand.…”