Figure 1.

The ‘winner take all’ strategy for identifying subdivisions of the thalamus (Zhang et al., 2008), utilizes known thalamocortical topographic segregation (Alexander and Crutcher, 1990; Jones, 2007) to identify functional boundaries in the thalamus. (A) Regions of interest (ROIs) used for the current analysis. These regions are composed of five disjoint cortical subdivisions, which include the prefrontal cortex (blue), motor/premotor (green), somatosensory (yellow), parietal/occipical cortex (purple), and temporal corex (red). (B) The average spontaneous signal generated from each cortical ROI is then correlated with all of the voxels in the thalamus. This creates five voxelwise statistical maps of the thalamus. (C) The strength of connectivity is then compared for each cortical ROI within each voxel. The cortical subdivision that correlates strongest with any given voxel ‘wins.’ The given voxel is then assigned the color of the winning cortical ROI. The resulting thalamic subdivisions are in substantial agreement with known thalamic nuclear grouping based on postmortem human studies (Morel, 2007; Mai et al., 2008) and anatomical track-tracing data from other mammalian species (Nieuwenhuys, 1988; Webster et al., 1995; Jones, 2007)