Mapping the brain activity is one of the core tasks of human brain mapping. Although great successes have been made in localizing and characterizing the brain activity for diverse tasks with functional MRI (fMRI), the human brain activity atlases are still not well established. With a large cohort of healthy adults (N > 500), the human brain activity atlas (BAA) is tackling the challenge by elucidating the brain activity across a wide array of domains through a comprehensive battery of functional localizers at multiple levels. A set of probabilistic maps will be constructed for each domain to fully describe the brain activity and its variability, including probabilistic activation map (PAM), the probabilistic functional regions map (PRM), the response magnitude map (RMM), and the response variability map (RVM).
Besides task-evoked fMRI, structural MRI (sMRI), resting-state functional MRI (rfMRI) and diffusion MRI (dMRI) will be acquired in the same cohort of subjects with the same scanner. These multi-modality data will be used to characterize the morphological and connectional basis of brain activities. Moreover, abundant behavioral data will also be collected to characterize the relationship between interindividual variability of brain activity and individual differences in cognition, perception, and personality.
Successful charting of the atlas of human brain activity will yield invaluable information about brain function. It will reveal much about the spatial and functional organization of the brain activity and anatomical basis of the brain activity, and thus answer the central question of the relationship between structure and function in the human brain. In application, oriented by the brain activity, BAA will provide a new framework to integrate information from multiple sources. Moreover, delineating the brain activity atlas in healthy adults will pave the way for future studies of brain function during development and aging, and in numerous brain disorders.
