Surface-based anatomo-functional parcellation of the auditory cortex

This paper presents a concept for parcellating the human auditory cortex into regions of specific functionality using anatomical and functional MRI. In contrast to standard approaches several sources of inter-subject variability can be compensated by explicitly modelling the variations. Anatomical variation is accounted for by a parcellation of the cortical surfaces into landmark-related auditory regions. To address variation in the relation of functional areas to the local anatomical frame of reference, the individual regional cortical activation patterns are then transformed into a sparse, object-based description, and analysed by employing an elastic graph matching approach. Experimental results show the benefits to be gained from the presented method, and underline the importance for inter-subject comparisons of a common, anatomically constrained cortical reference in inter-subject matching of functional activations associated to an auditory task.