The bilateral WM acoustic radiation (right) in the Juelich maxprob thr25 1mm atlas refers to the white matter fiber pathways that convey auditory information from the medial geniculate nucleus of the thalamus to the primary auditory cortex in the temporal lobe. These fibers form part of the central auditory pathway, running within the subcortical white matter and contributing to the transmission and processing of acoustic signals essential for sound perception, localization, and complex auditory functions such as speech discrimination. Functionally, the acoustic radiation is involved in relaying frequency, intensity, and temporal features of sounds, integrating them with cortical networks for higher-order auditory analysis. There is no direct Wikipedia article for “acoustic radiation (white matter)” as a distinct entry, but it is closely related to the thalamocortical auditory projections and the auditory cortex: Auditory cortex.
The bilateral WM acoustic radiation R, part of the auditory thalamocortical pathway connecting the medial geniculate nucleus to auditory cortex, has been implicated in several imaging-genetics and GWAS-derived endophenotype studies that examine white-matter microstructure (e.g., FA, MD) as quantitative traits. Large-scale MRI–GWAS consortia (such as ENIGMA and UK Biobank–based studies) have reported heritable variation in microstructural metrics of auditory and thalamocortical tracts, with associations to common variants in genes involved in axonal guidance, myelination, and synaptic function (for example, genes in pathways related to neuregulin/ErbB signaling, cell-adhesion molecules, and oligodendrocyte biology), though individual loci are more often reported at the level of broader temporal or thalamic radiations rather than the acoustic radiation specifically. Genetic influences on this region’s structure and connectivity have been indirectly linked to neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder, and dyslexia, where variants in genes affecting glutamatergic signaling, cortical development, and myelin integrity show associations with altered auditory-pathway white matter. In addition, polygenic risk for disorders such as schizophrenia and major depression has been associated with microstructural alterations in auditory and adjacent temporal white-matter tracts, suggesting that the bilateral WM acoustic radiation R participates in genetically influenced networks relevant to auditory processing, language, and higher-order cognitive and psychiatric phenotypes, even though highly region-specific GWAS hits for this exact Juelich atlas label remain limited.
Overview generated by GPT-4o (2026).
Region ID: 93
Hemisphere: bilateral
Atlas: Juelich 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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