The relative lack of specific, localized, reliable sex differences in human brain anatomy

What is it about?

Our overall goal of the paper was to see if there was a need to build separate anatomical atlases for men and for women for use, for example, to help characterize acquired brain injury. We found that the main average difference between men and women is the one highlighted in recent meta-analyses (of populations of industrialized countries): that men have ~10% larger brains but that there is a lot of variation from person to person. Further, there are reliable scaling laws that can be used to normalize brain quantities (e.g. cortical thickness or subcortical volume) to one another so that there are few mean localized, residual differences between the sexes after normalization is done.

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Why is it important?

The paper starts with a review of other previous papers in the field contained in a nice table. We also give specific values for use in normalizing cortical results when using the popular FreeSurfer cortical rendering and analysis software.

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