Cytoarchitectonic Characterization and Functional Decoding of Four New Areas in the Human Lateral Orbitofrontal Cortex.

A comprehensive concept of the biological basis of reward, social and emotional behavior, and language requires a deeper understanding of the microstructure and connectivity of the underlying brain regions. Such understanding could provide deeper insights into their role in functional networks, and form the anatomical basis of the functional segregation of this region as shown in recent imaging studies. Here, we investigated the cytoarchitecture of the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lateral OFC) in serial histological sections of 10 human postmortem brains by image analysis and a statistically reproducible approach to detect borders between cortical areas.

Cytoarchitecture and probability maps of the human medial orbitofrontal cortex.

Previous architectonical studies of human orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) provided divergent maps regarding number, location, and extent of areas. To solve this controversy, an observer-independent cytoarchitectonical mapping of medial OFC (mOFC) was performed. Borders of cortical areas were detected in histological sections of ten human post-mortem brains using a quantitative, statistically testable method, and their stereotaxic localization and intersubject variability were determined.