Speaker
Description
The outermost layer of the brain’s surface, the cerebral cortex, consists of gyri (hills) and sulci (valleys). In humans, cortical folding begins around the 16th week of gestation, and the most obvious cortical folding changes occur during the 26th week of gestation. The mechanism by which the folding pattern develops remains unknown; however, several hypotheses suggest that cortical folding occurs through biochemical or biomechanical mechanisms. The axonal tension hypothesis in particular claims that folding is caused by mechanical tension in axons. Based on a previous model that uses the location and magnitude of stress-strains to simulate cortical folding, our current model simulates biomechanical forces that contribute to cortical deformations over a series of time steps. We represent our model cortex with a semicircular mesh discretized into linear, quadrilateral elements, and a finite element method process is used to numerically compute the updated nodal displacements at each time step. We test our model with ferret MR imaging data, and our model is used to anticipate the biomechanical forces observed. In modeling the deformations, we gain insight into how sulci develop through the evolution of time.
