{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/neuro-evolutionary-evidence-for-a-universal","title":"Neuro-evolutionary evidence for a universal fractal primate brain shape","arxiv_id":"2209.08066","date":"2022-09-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yujiang Wang","Karoline Leiberg","Nathan Kindred","Christopher R. Madan","Colline Poirier","Christopher I. Petkov","Peter N. Taylor","Bruno C. C. Mota"],"abstract":"The cerebral cortex displays a bewildering diversity of shapes and sizes across and within species. Despite this diversity, we present a universal multi-scale description of primate cortices. We show that all cortical shapes can be described as a set of nested folds of different sizes. As neighbouring folds are gradually merged, the cortices of 11 primate species follow a common scale-free morphometric trajectory, that also overlaps with over 70 other mammalian species. Our results indicate that all cerebral cortices are approximations of the same archetypal fractal shape with a fractal dimension of $d_f=2.5$. Importantly, this new understanding enables a more precise quantification of brain morphology as a function of scale. To demonstrate the importance of this new understanding, we show a scale-dependent effect of ageing on brain morphology. We observe a more than four-fold increase in effect size (from 2 standard deviations to 8 standard deviations) at a spatial scale of approximately 2 mm compared to standard morphological analyses. Our new understanding may therefore generate superior biomarkers for a range of conditions in the future.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.08066v6","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.08066v6.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"neuro-evolutionary-evidence-for-a-universal","repo_url":"https://github.com/cnnp-lab/2024_folding_scales","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"neuro-evolutionary-evidence-for-a-universal","repo_url":"https://github.com/cnnp-lab/CorticalFoldingAnalysisTools","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"diversity","task_name":"Diversity"},{"task_slug":"morphological-analysis","task_name":"Morphological Analysis"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}