Large-scale comparative neuroimaging: Where are we and what do we need?

Abstract

Neuroimaging has a lot to offer comparative neuroscience. Although invasive “gold standard” techniques have a better spatial resolution, neuroimaging allows fast, whole-brain, repeatable, and multi-modal measurements of structure and function in living animals and post-mortem tissue. In the past years, comparative neuroimaging has increased in popularity. However, we argue that its most significant potential lies in its ability to collect large-scale datasets of many species to investigate principles of variability in brain organisation across whole orders of species—an ambition that is presently unfulfilled but achievable. We briefly review the current state of the field and explore what the current obstacles to such an approach are. We propose some calls to action.

Cross-species cortical alignment identifies different types of anatomical reorganization in the primate temporal lobe

“…Neuroimaging allows one to acquire high-resolution data from the same brains using different modalities within a short time. The digital nature of the data allows easy manipulation, making it ideal for the present purposes (Bihan et al, 1985;Grannell and Mansfield, 1975;Lauterbur, 1973;Le Bihan et al, 1986;Thiebaut de Schotten et al, 2019). As primary modality we use surface maps derived from the cortical ribbon of T1-and T2-weighted scans, which have been shown to correlate well with cortical myelinization and which are available for all three species (Glasser et al, 2014;Glasser and van Essen, 2011).…”

Cross-species cortical alignment identifies different types of neuroanatomical reorganization in the temporal lobe of higher primates

“…Neuroimaging allows one to acquire high-resolution data from the same brains using different modalities within a short time. The digital nature of the data allows easy manipulation, making it ideal for the present purposes (Thiebaut de Schotten et al, 2019). As primary modality we use surface maps derived from the cortical ribbon of T1and T2-weighted scans, which have been shown to correlate well with cortical myelinization and which are available and all three species Glasser and Van Essen, 2011).…”

Anchoring the human olfactory system to a functional gradient

“…Given that humans have easy access to food since birth, the functional connectivity within this system might have been partially pruned during brain development or through evolution. The availability of new open datasets for comparative research on the functional connectivity of primate species (Milham et al, 2018;Thiebaut de Schotten et al, 2019;Workshop et al, 2020) might confirm the hypothesis that the olfactocentric division is relatively smaller in humans compared to other primates. Finally, it is also possible that the archicortex (i.e.…”