A data-driven approach to the automated study of cross-species homologies [article]

Wolfgang Martin Pauli
2018 bioRxiv   pre-print
Behavioral neuroscience has made great strides in developing animal models of human behavior and psychiatric disorders. Animal models allow for the formulation of hypotheses regarding the mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders, and the opportunity to test these hypotheses using procedures that are too invasive for human participants. However, recent scientific reviews have highlighted the low success rate of translating results from animal models into clinical interventions in humans. One
more » ... oadblock for increasing this success rate is an only incomplete bidirectional functional mapping between the human and rodent brain. In an attempt to narrow this gap we created a framework for performing large-scale automated synthesis of human neuroimaging data and behavioral neuroscience data. This framework enables region to region mapping of brain regions across species, as well as cross-species mapping of psychological functions. As a proof of concept, we utilize the framework to create a biredictional cross-species mapping between the amygdala and hippocampus for fear-related and spatial memories, respectively. We then proceed to address two open questions in the field: (1) Do rodents have a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex? (2) Which human brain region corresponds to the rodent prelimbic cortex?
doi:10.1101/412114 fatcat:swkma7hrlfcetkl6egb2bdax6y