ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE published: 19 September 2013 HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00586 Tonotopic organization in the depth of human inferior colliculus David Ress 1* and Bharath Chandrasekaran2 1 Neuroscience Department, Center for Perceptual Systems, Imaging Research Center, Institute for Neuroscience, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin TX, USA 2 Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Center for Perceptual Systems, Institute for Neuroscience, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA Edited by: Experiments in animal models indicate that inferior colliculus (IC), the primary auditory mid- Florian Beissner, Martinos Center for brain structure, represents sound frequency in a particular spatial organization, a tonotopy, Biomedical Imaging, USA that proceeds from dorsal and superficial to ventral and deeper tissue. Experiments are Reviewed by: Elia Formisano, Maastricht University, presented that use high-resolution, sparse-sampling functional magnetic resonance imag- Netherlands ing (fMRI) at 3T to determine if tonotopic gradients can be reliably measured in human Marc Schönwiesner, University of IC using high-resolution fMRI. Stimuli were sequences of bandpass-filtered noise with dif- Montreal, Canada ferent center frequencies, presented sequentially while fMRI data were collected. Four *Correspondence: subjects performed an adaptive frequency-discrimination task throughout the experiment. David Ress, Neuroscience Results show statistically significant tonotopic gradients within both ICs of all subjects. Department, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, S104N MS Frequency gradients as a function of depth were measured using surface-based analysis BCM240, Houston, TX 77030, USA methods that make virtual penetrations into the IC tissue. This organization was evident e-mail:
[email protected] over substantial portions of the IC, at locations that are consistent with the expected loca- tion of the central nucleus of IC.The results confirm a laminar tonotopy in the human IC at 3T, but with a heterogeneous, patchy character.