Positioning of retinotopic areas and patterning of cerebral cortex layout.

We examined the positioning of human retinotopic areas, which were considered to be homologous with the macaque visual cortices, by applying computational geometry to MRI and fMRI data sets. We found a similarity between the positional relationship of the retinotopic areas in the human and macaque visual cortex, despite the large difference in brain size. This suggests that area maps in different species may share topological features, probably resulting from broad similarities in the patterning mechanism of cerebral cortex layout. (C) 2005 Lippincott Williams Wilkins.