Cortical folding

One of the most striking visual features of the brain is that its surface is folded. These characteristic folds carry information about brain development, ageing, and disease, and our goal is to understand and characterise cortical folding in a comprehensive manner.

Together with our collaborator Prof. Bruno Mota, we demonstrated that human and mammalian cortices follow a universal scaling law of cortical morphology that holds across species and individuals. We further showed that this scaling law is obeyed within parts of the same cortex and can be generalised to any point on the cortex. From this foundation, we derived independent morphological components that reveal brain structural differences missed by standard analyses, and found neuro-evolutionary evidence that primate brains share a universal fractal shape.

More recently, we developed a multiscale morphometry approach that characterises cortical shape across folding features of different scales, from individual sulci and gyri up to whole hemispheres. Applied across the lifespan, it reveals that morphological changes at different spatial scales can move in opposite directions, exposing patterns of brain ageing that remain hidden when shape is summarised at a single scale.

All tools are available as open-source software.