Cortical folding

The cortex's characteristic folds carry information about brain development, ageing, and disease — yet conventional measures such as thickness and surface area are typically treated in isolation. Our work shows they are deeply interrelated.

We demonstrated that human and mammalian cortices follow a universal scaling law of cortical morphology, holding across species, individuals, and brain regions. From this foundation, we derived independent morphological components that reveal abnormalities missed by standard univariate 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 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 — a finding that conventional single-scale measures obscure entirely.

All tools are available as open-source software.