What are the brain regions related to tinnitus shown in this figure?

Question

I am interested in learning about the neural mechanisms behind tinnitus, and was wondering if someone could help me to name the parts of the brain on the image below from a site of the University Liege that show increased activity in tinnitus sufferers.

From what I understand, the large area showing increased activity is the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe, although my knowledge of brain anatomy is not good enough to identify the others (though I have tried!)

What are the names of the areas showing increased activity for the tinnitus group in the above image?

Answer 1

I wasn't able to find the exact figure in the literature or in the webpages you linked, but the pages you link include a web page with references, including a PLOS paper from the University of Liege on tinnitus that is closely related to your current question and from a group affiliated to the same academic institution (Maudoux et al., 2012).

This paper includes Fig. 1 below obtained from tinnitus patients and a group of controls where they found the following structures to be involved in altered (either increased or decreased) baseline connectivities (numbers correspond to Fig. 1, the ones indicated with '(-)' showed less activity, the others more):

1. Brainstem/Cerebellum
2. Basal ganglia/NAc
3. Parahippocampal gyri
4. Superior temporal gyrus
5. Orbitofrontal cortex
6. Prefrontal cortex (-)
7. Prefrontal cortex
8. Superior frontal gyrus (-)
9. Inferior frontal gyrus
10. Fusiform gyrus (-)
11. Superior temporal gyrus (-)
12. Postcentral gyrus
13. Precentral gyrus
14. Cuneus/Precuneus (-)

Which of these 12 areas exactly correspond to the ones in your figure, I don't know. Because the ones in your Fig. are colored red, they very likely correspond to increased activities in their connectivity, so areas 1-5, 7, 9, 12 and 13 would be logical candidates.

^{Fig. 1. fMRI scans showing increased (red) and decreased (blue) connectivity in the auditory resting-state network in tinnitus. source: Maudoux et al. (2012)}

<sub>Reference
- Maudoux et al. PLOS One (2012); 7(5): e36222</sub>