PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Flavia Mancini
AU  - Martin I. Sereno
AU  - Min-Ho Lee
AU  - Giandomenico D Iannetti
AU  - Irene Tracey
TI  - Within-finger maps of tactile and nociceptive input in the human parietal cortex
AID  - 10.1101/599167
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 599167
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/04/04/599167.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/04/04/599167.full
AB  - The spatial representation of nociceptive input in the human parietal cortex is not fully understood. For instance, it is known that the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) contains a representation of nociceptive-selective input to different fingers, but it is unclear whether S1 subdivisions contain finer-grained, within-finger maps of nociceptive input. It is also unknown whether within-finger maps of somatosensory input exist in intraparietal regions. Therefore, we used high-field 7T functional MRI to reveal within-finger maps of nociceptive and tactile inputs in the human parietal cortex. Although we replicated the previous findings of between-finger maps of nociceptive input spanning S1 subdivisions, we found weak and inconsistent evidence for within-finger maps of nociceptive input in S1 subdivisions. In the same subjects, we found mirrored, within-finger maps of tactile input in areas 3a, 3b, and 1. Importantly, we discovered a within-finger map of nociceptive input, but not of tactile input, in the human intraparietal area 1 (hIP1). In conclusion, our study indicates that the spatial representation of nociceptive input in the parietal cortex partly differs from that of tactile input and reports the discovery of a within-finger map of nociceptive input in hIP1.New & Noteworthy We report the discovery of a fine-grained map of nociceptive input to finger segments in the human intraparietal area 1.