Central Lateral – Lateral Posterior – Medial Pulvinar

Anatomy

• The atlas groups these nuclei together because of shared cortical connectivity patterns.
• The central lateral nucleus belongs to the intralaminar group; the lateral posterior and medial pulvinar are connected with parietal and limbic cortices.

Functions

• Maintaining wakefulness and the level of consciousness (intralaminar nuclei; the arousal network).
• Attention and multisensory integration (lateral posterior, medial pulvinar).

Clinical

• Stimulation of the central thalamus has been studied in disorders of consciousness after severe traumatic brain injury (Schiff et al., 2007).

In the model

How this structure is defined in the 3D model, and the data source.

Najdenovska et al. (2018) thalamic nuclei atlas (diffusion MRI clustering; ICBM 2009a symmetric template). Each voxel of the CerebrA thalamus was assigned to the most probable nucleus in these probability maps; because the atlas thalamus is about 20% larger than CerebrA’s, the borders were fitted to the shell (overlap of the two thalami: Dice 0.86–0.89).

References

Full citations for the card; links go to the paper (DOI) or a PubMed search.

1. Schiff ND et al. Behavioural improvements with thalamic stimulation after severe traumatic brain injury. Nature 2007;448:600–603. DOI: 10.1038/nature06041