Atlas of the Human Brain

Mai, Juergen K., Assheuer, Joseph, Paxinos, George

San Diego: Academic Press, 1997.

Atlas of surface landmarks and internal structure of the human brain; English and Latin nomenclatures; well illustrated by schematic drawings and photographs.

The primary purpose of the book is to provide magnetic resonance images (MRIs) of the human brain side-by-side with block-face photographs of comparable cut sections, with thoroughly labeled schematic diagrams and with diagrams of the sources of blood supply of matched sections. Sections are presented at 1 cm intervals in horizontal, coronal and sagittal planes with four different MR weightings to reveal different tissue contrasts.

An additional aim of the book is to provide a myeloarchitectonic atlas of coronal sections in Talairach space with sufficient magnification and labeling detail for mapping immunohistochemical and autoradiographic data. Photographs of myelin-stained sections from a standard brain that was prepared in the Vogts' laboratory in the early 1900s and various regions of which have been analyzed and reported in detail by neuroanatomists in subsequent decades are presented. Thirty six sections from frontal pole to occipital pole, selected at 1 cm to 8 cm intervals depending on the size of the smallest structures, are presented at 5X magnification with copiously labeled diagrams of matching size.

Multiple tables and indexes provide information on English-Latin terminological equivalents and compare groupings of primary structures into superstructures according to the segmentation schemes of different authors.