Brain Advance Access originally published online on February 24, 2007
Brain 2007 130(3):602-605; doi:10.1093/brain/awm008
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Scientific Commentaries |
From hodology to function
Institute of Psychiatry,
King's College London,
London, SE5 8AF, UK
E-mail: m.catani@iop.kcl.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In 1993 Francis Crick and Edward Jones appealed to the scientific community with an editorial in Nature entitled ‘Backwardness of human neuroanatomy’. Their aim was twofold: to ‘make a wide audience aware’ of how little is known about human brain anatomy, and to highlight the urgent need for ‘new methods to solve this problem’ (Crick and Jones, 1993
).
Around that time a group of researchers based at the NIH were working on a new magnetic resonance technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) (Basser et al., 1994). Almost 15 years after publication of the Crick and Jones editorial, diffusion-based imaging methods represent perhaps the most concrete response to their appeal. Without doubt, diffusion-based imaging methods are revolutionizing the field of neuroimaging along two fronts: for the first time we are able to reconstruct white matter pathways in the living human brain and re-explore connectional anatomy after a long