Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 33, Issue 3, 15 November 2006, Pages 843-854
NeuroImage

The influence of sulcal variability on morphometry of the human anterior cingulate and paracingulate cortex

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.06.061Get rights and content

Abstract

Human anterior cingulate (ACC) and paracingulate (PaC) cortices play an important role in cognitive and affective regulation and have been implicated in numerous psychiatric and neurological conditions. The region they comprise displays marked inter-individual variability in sulcal and gyral architecture, and although recent evidence suggests that this variability has functional significance, it is often ignored in automated and region-of-interest (ROI) morphometric investigations. This has lead to confounded interpretation of results and inconsistent findings across a number of studies and in a variety of clinical populations. In this paper, we present a reliable method for parcellating the dorsal, ventral, and subcallosal ACC and PaC that accounts for individual variation in the local cortical folding pattern. We also investigated the effect of one well characterized morphological variation, the incidence of the paracingulate sulcus (PCS), on regional volumes in 24 (12 male, 12 female) healthy participants. The presence of a PCS was shown to affect both ACC and PaC volumes, such that it was associated with an 88% increase in paracingulate cortex and a concomitant 39% decrease in cingulate cortex. These findings illustrate the potential confounds inherent in morphometric approaches that ignore or attempt to minimize inter-individual variations in sulcal and gyral anatomy and underscore the need to consider this variability when attempting to understand disease processes or characterize brain structure–function relationships.

Section snippets

Participants

The sample comprised 24 (12 male, 12 female) participants with no personal or family history of psychiatric or neurological illness who were pre-selected based on their PCS morphology. Our previous work (Yücel et al., 2001, Yücel et al., 2002a, Yücel et al., 2002b, Yücel et al., 2003a, Fornito et al., 2004) has used a three-category classification system for the PCS, denoting it as being either ‘absent’, ‘present’, or ‘prominent’, based on its rostro-caudal extent. In a large normative sample (n

Reliability analysis

To ensure generalizability of the protocol, reliabilities were studied in a separate sample of 15 randomly selected individuals comprising cases with both symmetric and asymmetric PCS patterns. Most ICCs were > 0.90, and none < 0.80, indicating that the method provides a reliable means for measuring ACC volume while considering inter-individual variations in sulcal and gyral anatomy. Intra- and inter-rater reliabilities for each region are presented in Table 1.

Volumetric comparisons

Mean volumes for each subregion in

Discussion

This study presented a reliable method for parcellating the ACC and PaC into distinct and functionally relevant subregions while considering variations in sulcal and gyral anatomy. Previous morphometric studies have typically focused only on the ACC (Haznedar et al., 1997, Szeszko et al., 1999a, Szeszko et al., 1999b, Pujol et al., 2002, Miller et al., 2003, Rauch et al., 2003, Zhou et al., 2005) or failed to account for PCS variability when measuring the PaC (Caviness et al., 1996,

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Sue Cotton and Mr. Anthony Ang for helpful discussions regarding the manuscript. This research was supported by the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre (Sunshine Hospital), Department of Psychiatry, the University of Melbourne, the National Health and Medical Research Council (ID 236175; 350241), and the Ian Potter Foundation. Neuroimaging analysis was facilitated by the Neuropsychiatry Imaging Laboratory managed by Ms. Bridget Soulsby at the Melbourne

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