The bilateral Right Cerebrum.Occipital Lobe.Fusiform Gyrus.Gray Matter.Brodmann area 37 corresponds to a cytoarchitectonic and functional region located in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, extending into the fusiform gyrus and associated with high-level visual processing. BA37 is strongly implicated in object recognition, particularly the processing of complex visual stimuli such as faces, words, and other category-specific forms, and contributes to multimodal integration of visual inputs with semantic memory. Its gray matter contains specialized neuronal populations that support visual form representation and mapping of visual features to stored conceptual knowledge, and lesions in this region can lead to deficits such as prosopagnosia or visual agnosia. While there is no dedicated Wikipedia page for Brodmann area 37, it is closely related to the Fusiform gyrus.
The bilateral right occipital fusiform gyrus (BA37), a core component of high-level visual and category-selective processing (including face and word recognition), has been repeatedly implicated in genetic studies through structural and functional MRI phenotypes, as well as disorder-related GWAS. Large neuroimaging GWAS (e.g., ENIGMA, UK Biobank) have identified common variants associated with fusiform and adjacent occipitotemporal cortical thickness and surface area, including loci near genes such as HMGA2, MIR597, and others involved in neurodevelopment, synaptic formation, and cell adhesion, although findings typically refer to broader fusiform/occipitotemporal regions rather than Talairach BA37 specifically. Genetic liability for neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric conditions that affect face and word processing—such as autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, dyslexia, and prosopagnosia—has been linked to altered structure or activation in the right fusiform gyrus, with candidate genes including CNTNAP2, NRXN1, NRG1, FOXP2, and KIAA0319 among those associated with relevant language/visual cognition and connectivity phenotypes; however, most evidence connects these genes to circuit-level deficits rather than uniquely to BA37. Polygenic risk scores for autism and schizophrenia show associations with fusiform and occipitotemporal morphology and functional connectivity, and GWAS of cognitive traits such as general intelligence, reading ability, and face recognition ability have identified variants whose downstream effects converge on occipitotemporal networks that include BA37. Overall, genetic influences on this region appear highly polygenic and distributed, with no single gene or variant specifically or exclusively tied to the bilateral right BA37 gray matter, but consistent evidence that common genetic variation shaping neurodevelopment, synaptic signaling, and white matter connectivity contributes to individual and disorder-related differences in fusiform/BA37 structure and function.
Overview generated by GPT-4o (2026).
Region ID: 330
Hemisphere: bilateral
Atlas: Talairach labels 2mm
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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