Merge in the Human Brain: A Sub-Region Based Functional Investigation in the Left Pars Opercularis

The advent of functional neuroimaging has allowed tremendous advances in our understanding of brain-language relationships, in addition to generating substantial empirical data on this subject in the form of thousands of activation peak coordinates reported in a decade of language studies. We performed a large-scale meta-analysis of this literature, aimed at defining the composition of the phonological, semantic, and sentence processing networks in the frontal, temporal, and inferior parietal regions of the left cerebral hemisphere. For each of these language components, activation peaks issued from relevant component-specific contrasts were submitted to a spatial clustering algorithm, which gathered activation peaks on the basis of their relative distance in the MNI space. From a sample of 730 activation peaks extracted from 129 scientific reports selected among 260, we isolated 30 activation clusters, defining the functional fields constituting three distributed networks of frontal and temporal areas and revealing the functional organization of the left hemisphere for language. The functional role of each activation cluster is discussed based on the nature of the tasks in which it was involved. This meta-analysis sheds light on several contemporary issues, notably on the fine-scale functional architecture of the inferior frontal gyrus for phonological and semantic processing, the evidence for an elementary audio-motor loop involved in both comprehension and production of syllables including the primary auditory areas and the motor mouth area, evidence of areas of overlap between phonological and semantic processing, in particular at the location of the selective human voice area that was the seat of partial overlap of the three language components, the evidence of a cortical area in the pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus dedicated to syntactic processing and in the posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus a region selectively activated by sentence and text processing, and the hypothesis that different working memory perception-actions loops are identifiable for the different language components. These results argue for large-scale architecture networks rather than modular organization of language in the left hemisphere.

The sizes of Brodmann's areas 44 and 45 (Broca's speech region) and their extent in relation to macroscopic landmarks and surrounding areas differ considerably among the available cytoarchitectonic maps. Such variability may be due to intersubject differences in anatomy, observer-dependent discrepancies in cytoarchitectonic mapping, or both. Because a reliable definition of cytoarchitectonic borders is important for interpreting functional imaging data, we mapped areas 44 and 45 by means of an observer-independent technique. In 10 human brains, the laminar distributions of cell densities were measured vertical to the cortical surface in serial coronal sections stained for perikarya. Thousands of density profiles were obtained. Cytoarchitectonic borders were defined as statistically significant changes in laminar patterns. The analysis of the three-dimensional reconstructed brains and the two areas showed that cytoarchitectonic borders did not consistently coincide with sulcal contours. Therefore, macroscopic features are not reliable landmarks of cytoarchitectonic borders. Intersubject variability in the cytoarchitecture of areas 44 and 45 was significantly greater than cytoarchitectonic differences between these areas in individual brains. Although the volumes of area 44 differed across subjects by up to a factor of 10, area 44 but not area 45 was left-over-right asymmetrical in all brains. All five male but only three of five female brains had significantly higher cell densities on the left than on the right side. Such hemispheric and gender differences were not detected in area 45. These morphologic asymmetries of area 44 provide a putative correlate of the functional lateralization of speech production. Copyright 1999 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

A new three-dimensional imaging technique which is applicable for 3D MR imaging throughout the body is introduced. In our preliminary investigations we have acquired high-quality 3D image sets of the abdomen showing minimal respiratory artifacts in just over 7 min (voxel size 2.7 X 2.7 X 2.7 mm3), and 3D image sets of the head showing excellent gray/white contrast in less than 6 min (voxel size 1.0 X 2.0 X 1.4 mm3).