Interhemispheric connectivity across species
It has been argued that the hemispheres are asymmetric particularly in humans because our hemispheres are more independent than in other mammals. We hypothesize that the opposite must be true - in order for the two sides to do different things, they must be able to talk with each other.

In this project, we showed that a connectivity between the two hemispheres is stable across species, and is in fact stronger than the average connection. In the process, we shoed that previous reports of decreased connectivity between the hemispheres in large-brained animals were based on incorrect assumptions.

The previous report measured brain-related surface areas from 13 primate species to estimate connections counts. We mined the literature for values needed to estimate actual connection counts from the surface area data.

 

 

Original and parsed figures.               

To mine the data, I manually annotated over 20 figures from the literature, then implementing basic image parsing code to estimate values from the figures. I validated the data by comparing summary statistics of my parsed data to those reported in the figure, as well as re-creating the figures. All data and code have been posted to Github.

Representative posters and talks:

• SfN 2014 (Poster)