Faculty Opinions recommendation of Functional boundaries in the human cerebellum revealed by a multi-domain task battery.
Stephan Patrick Swinnen · Faculty Opinions – Post-Publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature · 2020
There is compelling evidence that the human cerebellum is engaged in a wide array of motor and cognitive tasks. A fundamental question centers on whether the cerebellum is organized into distinct functional subregions. To address this question, we employed a rich task battery designed to tap into a broad range of cognitive processes. During four functional MRI sessions, participants performed a battery of 26 diverse tasks comprising 47 unique conditions. Using the data from this multi-domain task battery, we derived a comprehensive functional parcellation of the cerebellar cortex and evaluated it by predicting functional boundaries in a novel set of tasks. The new parcellation successfully identified distinct functional subregions, providing significant improvements over existing parcellations derived from task-free data. Lobular boundaries, commonly used to summarize functional data, did not coincide with functional subdivisions. The new parcellation provides a functional atlas to guide future neuroimaging studies. PMID: 31285616 Funding information This work was supported by: NIMH NIH HHS, United States Grant ID: U54 MH091657 NINDS NIH HHS, United States Grant ID: R01 NS105839 NINDS NIH HHS, United States Grant ID: R01 NS092079