Heritability analysis of surface-based cortical thickness estimation on a large twin cohort

The aim of this paper is to assess the heritability of cerebral cortex, based on measurements of grey matter (GM) thickness derived from structural MR images (sMRI). With data acquired from a large twin cohort (328 subjects), an automated method was used to estimate the cortical thickness, and EM-ICP surface registration algorithm was used to establish the correspondence of cortex across the population. An ACE model was then employed to compute the heritability of cortical thickness. Heritable cortical thickness measures various cortical regions, especially in frontal and parietal lobes, such as bilateral postcentral gyri, superior occipital gyri, superior parietal gyri, precuneus, the orbital part of the right frontal gyrus, right medial superior frontal gyrus, right middle occipital gyrus, right paracentral lobule, left precentral gyrus, and left dorsolateral superior frontal gyrus.