Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany; Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Research Center Jülich, Jülich, Germany; Jülich Aachen Research Alliance (JARA)-Translational Brain Medicine, Aachen, Germany.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2013 Dec;34(12):3247-66. doi: 10.1002/hbm.22138. Epub 2012 Jul 17.
Although the amygdala complex is a brain area critical for human behavior, knowledge of its subspecialization is primarily derived from experiments in animals. We here employed methods for large-scale data mining to perform a connectivity-derived parcellation of the human amygdala based on whole-brain coactivation patterns computed for each seed voxel. Voxels within the histologically defined human amygdala were clustered into distinct groups based on their brain-wide coactivation maps. Using this approach, connectivity-based parcellation divided the amygdala into three distinct clusters that are highly consistent with earlier microstructural distinctions. Meta-analytic connectivity modelling then revealed the derived clusters' brain-wide connectivity patterns, while meta-data profiling allowed their functional characterization. These analyses revealed that the amygdala's laterobasal nuclei group was associated with coordinating high-level sensory input, whereas its centromedial nuclei group was linked to mediating attentional, vegetative, and motor responses. The often-neglected superficial nuclei group emerged as particularly sensitive to olfactory and probably social information processing. The results of this model-free approach support the concordance of structural, connectional, and functional organization in the human amygdala and point to the importance of acknowledging the heterogeneity of this region in neuroimaging research.
尽管杏仁核复合体是对人类行为至关重要的大脑区域，但对其亚专业化的了解主要来自于动物实验。我们在这里采用了大规模数据挖掘方法，根据每个种子体素计算的全脑共激活模式，对人类杏仁核进行基于连接的分区。基于其全脑共激活图谱，将组织学定义的人类杏仁核内的体素聚类为不同的组。使用这种方法，基于连接的分区将杏仁核分为三个不同的簇，这与早期的微观结构区分高度一致。随后的元分析连接建模揭示了所得到的簇的全脑连接模式，而元数据分析则允许对其进行功能表征。这些分析表明，杏仁核的基底外侧核群与协调高级感觉输入有关，而其中央核群与介导注意力、植物性和运动反应有关。通常被忽视的浅层核群似乎对嗅觉，可能还有社会信息处理特别敏感。这种无模型方法的结果支持了人类杏仁核在结构、连接和功能组织上的一致性，并指出在神经影像学研究中承认该区域异质性的重要性。
