The Left occipital-fusiform-gyrus, as defined in the brainCOLOR Atlas, is a ventral temporal–occipital cortical region spanning the posterior fusiform gyrus at the junction of the occipital and temporal lobes, typically corresponding to portions of Brodmann areas 18, 19, and 37. It forms part of the ventral visual processing stream (“what” pathway) and is implicated in high-level visual perception, including object, face, and word/form recognition, with a left-hemispheric bias for visually presented language and symbolic stimuli. Anatomically, it lies medial and inferior to the lateral occipital cortex, lateral to the collateral sulcus, and anterior to primary visual areas of the occipital lobe, with robust connectivity to other ventral temporal regions and higher-order visual association cortices. There is no direct Wikipedia article for this composite label; a closely related structure is the Fusiform gyrus.
Genetic associations for the Left occipital-fusiform-gyrus, as defined in the brainCOLOR Atlas and similar parcellations, largely emerge from imaging genetics and GWAS of cortical structure and function in occipitotemporal regions. Variants near or within genes involved in neuronal migration, synaptic development, and axon guidance—such as KIAA0319, DCDC2, and ROBO1—have been repeatedly linked to fusiform and occipitotemporal morphology and activation patterns in reading and language tasks, supporting their role in developmental dyslexia and related reading disorders. Large-scale neuroimaging GWAS from consortia such as ENIGMA and UK Biobank have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms near genes including HMGA2, IGF1, and METTL10 that influence occipitotemporal cortical surface area, thickness, and volume, suggesting polygenic effects on this region’s structural variability. Functionally, this region overlaps with the visual word form area and face-processing networks, and genetic variants associated with autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, and prosopagnosia (for example, in CNTNAP2 and NRXN family genes) have been linked to altered fusiform/occipitotemporal activation or anatomy, implicating the Left occipital-fusiform-gyrus as a convergence point for genetic influences on high-level visual, social, and language-related processing.
Overview generated by GPT-4o (2026).
Region ID: 77
Hemisphere: Left
Atlas: brainCOLOR
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Full Quality Version: Download MP4
Full Quality Version: Download MP4
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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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