The visual white matter connecting human area prostriata and the thalamus is retinotopically organized
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The visual white matter connecting human area prostriata and the thalamus is retinotopically organized Jan W. Kurzawski1 · Kyriaki Mikellidou2 · Maria Concetta Morrone1,3 · Franco Pestilli4 Received: 20 April 2019 / Accepted: 5 June 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The human visual system is capable of processing visual information from fovea to the far peripheral visual field. Recent fMRI studies have shown a full and detailed retinotopic map in area prostriata, located ventro-dorsally and anterior to the calcarine sulcus along the parieto-occipital sulcus with strong preference for peripheral and wide-field stimulation. Here, we report the anatomical pattern of white matter connections between area prostriata and the thalamus encompassing the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). To this end, we developed and utilized an automated pipeline comprising a series of Apps that run openly on the cloud computing platform brainlife.io to analyse 139 subjects of the Human Connectome Project (HCP). We observe a continuous and extended bundle of white matter fibers from which two subcomponents can be extracted: one passing ventrally parallel to the optic radiations (OR) and another passing dorsally circumventing the lateral ventricle. Interestingly, the loop travelling dorsally connects the thalamus with the central visual field representation of prostriata located anteriorly, while the other loop travelling more ventrally connects the LGN with the more peripheral visual field representation located posteriorly. We then analyse an additional cohort of 10 HCP subjects using a manual plane extraction method outside brainlife.io to study the relationship between the two extracted white matter subcomponents and eccentricity, myelin and cortical thickness gradients within prostriata. Our results are consistent with a retinotopic segregation recently demonstrated in the OR, connecting the LGN and V1 in humans and reveal for the first time a retinotopic segregation regarding the trajectory of a fiber bundle between the thalamus and an associative visual area. Keywords Prostriata · Lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) · Thalamus · Tractography · Myelin · Cortical thickness · Fovea · Periphery
Introduction
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02096-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Franco Pestilli [email protected] 1
IRCCS Stella Maris, Viale del Tirreno, 331, Pisa, Italy
2
Department of Psychology and Center for Applied Neuroscience, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus
3
Department of Translational Research On New Technologies in Medicine and Surgery, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy
4
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Program in Neuroscience and Program in Cognitive Science, Indiana University, 1101 E 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47401, USA
Mikellidou et al. (2017b) described for the first time the functional properties of area prostriata in humans using a novel w
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