A robust transcortical profile scanner for generating 2-D traverses in histological sections of richly curved cortical courses

Quantitative analysis of the cerebral cortex has become more important since neuroimaging methods have revealed many subfunctions of cortical regions that were thought to be typical for only one specific function. Furthermore, it is often unknown if a certain area may be subdivided observer independently into subareas. These questions lead to an analytical problem. How can we analyze the cytoarchitecture of the human cerebral cortex in a quantitative manner in order to confirm classical transition regions between distinct areas and to detect new ones. Scanning the cerebral cortex is difficult because it presents a richly curved course and sectioning always leads to partially nonperpendicular sectioned regions of the tissue. Therefore, different methods were tested to determine which of them are most reliable with respect to generating perpendicular testlines in the cerebral cortex. We introduce a new technique based on electrical field theory. The results of this technique are compared with those of conventional techniques. It was found that straight traverses generated by the electrodynamic model present significantly smaller intertraversal. differences than the conventional approaches. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).