The bilateral white matter (WM) acoustic radiation in the right hemisphere is a component of the auditory pathway that consists of myelinated projection fibers conveying acoustic information from the medial geniculate nucleus of the thalamus to the primary auditory cortex in the superior temporal lobe, particularly Heschl’s gyrus. This tract supports precise temporal and spectral processing of sound, contributing to auditory perception, speech decoding, and localization of acoustic stimuli. As modeled in the Juelich maxprob atlas, it represents a probabilistic reconstruction of these thalamocortical fibers rather than a discrete gray-matter nucleus, emphasizing its role as a conduit for sensory information transfer rather than primary signal integration. There is no direct Wikipedia article for this exact tract; a related structure is the Auditory radiation.
The bilateral white-matter acoustic radiation (right hemisphere) from the Juelich maxprob thr25 2 mm atlas corresponds largely to the acoustic (auditory) radiation connecting the medial geniculate nucleus of the thalamus with primary and association auditory cortex, and genetic associations reported to date relate mainly to broader auditory and temporal-lobe white-matter pathways rather than this parcel specifically. Large-scale GWAS and imaging-genetics studies (e.g., UK Biobank–based analyses of diffusion MRI) have identified common variants influencing white-matter microstructure in temporal and thalamocortical tracts, including genes involved in axon guidance, myelination, and oligodendrocyte function (such as variants near or within NTRK3, CNTN4, MAG, and other myelin-related loci), but these are typically reported at the level of major tracts (e.g., auditory or superior longitudinal fasciculi) or global white-matter metrics, not specifically labeled “WM Acoustic radiation R (Juelich).” Genetic correlations and polygenic-risk analyses have linked alterations in temporal-lobe and thalamocortical white matter—including regions overlapping the acoustic radiation—to neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder, and dyslexia, as well as to hearing-related traits (e.g., speech-in-noise perception and age-related hearing loss), yet current literature does not provide a robust, region-specific catalog of GWAS hits uniquely annotated to this exact Juelich atlas parcel, and associations are instead inferred from its anatomical overlap with more coarsely defined auditory white-matter pathways.
Overview generated by GPT-4o (2026).
Region ID: 93
Hemisphere: bilateral
Atlas: Juelich maxprob thr25 2mm
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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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