Department of Radiology, Center for Image Sciences, UMC Utrecht, Q101.132, P.O.Box 85500, 3508 GA, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Department of Psychology and Center of Neural Science, NYU, New York, USA.
Brain Struct Funct. 2021 Sep;226(7):2099-2112. doi: 10.1007/s00429-021-02309-5. Epub 2021 Jun 5.
Several neuroimaging studies have shown the somatotopy of body part representations in primary somatosensory cortex (S1), but the functional hierarchy of distinct subregions in human S1 has not been adequately addressed. The current study investigates the functional hierarchy of cyto-architectonically distinct regions, Brodmann areas BA3, BA1, and BA2, in human S1. During functional MRI experiments, we presented participants with vibrotactile stimulation of the fingertips at three different vibration frequencies. Using population Receptive Field (pRF) modeling of the fMRI BOLD activity, we identified the hand region in S1 and the somatotopy of the fingertips. For each voxel, the pRF center indicates the finger that most effectively drives the BOLD signal, and the pRF size measures the spatial somatic pooling of fingertips. We find a systematic relationship of pRF sizes from lower-order areas to higher-order areas. Specifically, we found that pRF sizes are smallest in BA3, increase slightly towards BA1, and are largest in BA2, paralleling the increase in visual receptive field size as one ascends the visual hierarchy. Additionally, we find that the time-to-peak of the hemodynamic response in BA3 is roughly 0.5 s earlier compared to BA1 and BA2, further supporting the notion of a functional hierarchy of subregions in S1. These results were obtained during stimulation of different mechanoreceptors, suggesting that different afferent fibers leading up to S1 feed into the same cortical hierarchy.
几项神经影像学研究表明,初级躯体感觉皮层(S1)中存在身体部位代表的躯体定位,但人类 S1 中不同子区域的功能层次结构尚未得到充分解决。本研究调查了人类 S1 中细胞构筑学上不同区域(Brodmann 区域 BA3、BA1 和 BA2)的功能层次结构。在功能磁共振成像实验中,我们向参与者呈现了三个不同振动频率的指尖振动刺激。使用 fMRI BOLD 活动的群体感受野(pRF)建模,我们确定了 S1 中的手部区域和指尖的躯体定位。对于每个体素,pRF 中心表示最有效地驱动 BOLD 信号的手指,而 pRF 大小则衡量指尖的空间躯体融合。我们发现 pRF 大小从低阶区域到高阶区域存在系统关系。具体来说,我们发现 pRF 大小在 BA3 中最小,向 BA1 略有增加,在 BA2 中最大,与视觉层次结构中视觉感受野大小的增加相平行。此外,我们发现 BA3 中的血流动力学反应到达峰值的时间比 BA1 和 BA2 早约 0.5s,这进一步支持了 S1 中子区域的功能层次结构的概念。这些结果是在刺激不同机械感受器时获得的,这表明不同的传入纤维在进入 S1 时会进入相同的皮质层次结构。