The bilateral Left Caudate, as defined in the Harvard-Oxford subcortical structural atlas, corresponds to the left caudate nucleus, a C-shaped gray matter structure within the dorsal striatum of the basal ganglia, situated medial to the internal capsule and lateral to the lateral ventricles. Composed primarily of medium spiny GABAergic neurons, it receives dense glutamatergic inputs from frontal and parietal association cortices and dopaminergic projections from the substantia nigra pars compacta, and projects via the internal segment of the globus pallidus and substantia nigra pars reticulata to thalamic nuclei that relay back to the cortex. Functionally, the caudate nucleus is implicated in motor planning, action selection, procedural learning, goal-directed behavior, and various cognitive processes including working memory and executive control, as well as reward-based learning and decision-making. Pathophysiologically, caudate dysfunction or degeneration is associated with movement disorders such as Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, as well as neuropsychiatric conditions including obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Caudate nucleus
The bilateral left caudate, as defined in the Harvard-Oxford subcortical atlas, has been repeatedly implicated in genetic studies of neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative phenotypes, with GWAS and imaging-genetics work identifying variants that influence its volume, structure, and function. Large-scale ENIGMA and UK Biobank analyses have linked common variants in and near genes involved in neurodevelopment, calcium signaling, and synaptic function—such as HMGA2, DCC, BDNF, and several loci on chromosomes 3, 6, 11, and 17—to caudate volume and morphology, often in a partially lateralized manner that includes the left nucleus. Polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, ADHD, and autism spectrum disorder show associations with caudate size and activity, consistent with the region’s role in frontostriatal circuits implicated in cognitive control, reward processing, and habit learning. Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and other basal ganglia–related movement disorders involve the caudate structurally and functionally and have well-characterized genetic components (e.g., SNCA, LRRK2, GBA, HTT expansions) that contribute to caudate degeneration or dysfunction, while common Alzheimer’s disease risk variants such as APOE ε4 have been associated with altered caudate volume in imaging-genetics cohorts. Additional GWAS have linked caudate-related metrics to traits including general cognitive ability, educational attainment, smoking and substance use, and risk-taking or impulsivity, reflecting pleiotropic genetic influences on striatal circuitry that converge on the left caudate among other basal ganglia regions.
Overview generated by GPT-4o (2026).
Region ID: 5
Hemisphere: bilateral
Atlas: HarvardOxford sub maxprob thr25 1mm
Full Quality Version: Download MP4
Full Quality Version: Download MP4
Wali Sidiqyar*, Gaurav Rudravaram*, Elyssa M. McMaster, Trent M. Schwartz, Adam M. Saunders, Kurt G. Schilling, Bennett A. Landman "Introducing SPINS: A Shared Public Visualization Library of Neuroanatomical Structures." Medical Imaging with Deep Learning- short paper
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