Division of Newborn Medicine, Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Neuroimage. 2011 Apr 15;55(4):1490-6. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.12.080. Epub 2011 Jan 9.
Sulcal pits are hypothesized to form early during development and be under tighter genetic control than other regions of the cortex. We investigated the relationship between the presence of sulcal pits and intellectual ability, estimated with the full-scale, verbal, and performance intelligence quotient (IQ), in the brains of 78 healthy young adults. We automatically extracted sulcal pits from magnetic resonance images and developed a method for their automatic labeling. The difference in the number of sulcal pits between high and average IQ groups for each labeled region was statistically analyzed. We found that in the high verbal IQ group a sulcal pit was more frequently present in the left posterior inferior frontal sulcus (70% in the high IQ group vs. 40% in the average IQ group) and the right posterior inferior temporal sulcus (70% vs. 43%), which have been reported to be regions of language function. Greater mean curvature of the deep sulcal areas in these regions was shown for the high verbal IQ group. This provides the complementary morphological information about the presence of more sulcal pits. These findings suggest that factors influencing verbal intelligence may emerge in the language areas early during cortical development and may be under tight genetic control.
脑沟回小凹被假设在发育早期形成，并且比皮质的其他区域受到更严格的遗传控制。我们研究了 78 名健康年轻成年人大脑中脑沟回小凹的存在与智力（以全量表、言语和操作智商衡量）之间的关系。我们从磁共振图像中自动提取脑沟回小凹，并开发了一种自动标记它们的方法。对每个标记区域中高智商组和平均智商组之间脑沟回小凹数量的差异进行了统计学分析。我们发现，在高言语智商组中，左侧后下额回（高智商组中 70%，平均智商组中 40%）和右侧后下颞回（高智商组中 70%，平均智商组中 43%）更频繁地出现脑沟回小凹，这些区域被报道为语言功能区域。这些区域中深脑沟回的平均曲率较大，表明高言语智商组存在更多的脑沟回小凹。这提供了关于存在更多脑沟回小凹的补充形态学信息。这些发现表明，影响言语智力的因素可能在皮质发育早期出现在语言区域，并且可能受到严格的遗传控制。
