An algorithmic method for functionally defining regions of interest in the ventral visual pathway

• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.02.055
• Publication Date: 2012-03-05T19:41:41Z
• Authors: J.B. Julian; Evelina Fedorenko; Jason Webster; Nancy Kanwisher
• Keywords: Adult; Male; 0301 basic medicine; Brain Mapping; Adolescent; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Young Adult; 03 medical and health sciences; Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; Neural Pathways; Humans; Female; Algorithms; Visual Cortex

In a widely used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis method, functional regions of interest (fROIs) are handpicked in each participant using macroanatomic landmarks as guides, and the response of these regions to new conditions is then measured. A key limitation of this standard handpicked fROI method is the subjectivity of decisions about which clusters of activated voxels should be treated as the particular fROI in question in each subject. Here we apply the Group-Constrained Subject-Specific (GSS) method for defining fROIs, recently developed for identifying language fROIs (Fedorenko et al., 2010), to algorithmically identify fourteen well-studied category-selective regions of the ventral visual pathway (Kanwisher, 2010). We show that this method retains the benefit of defining fROIs in individual subjects without the subjectivity inherent in the traditional handpicked fROI approach. The tools necessary for using this method are available on our website (http://web.mit.edu/bcs/nklab/GSS.shtml).