Magnetic resonance imaging of the post-mortem autistic brain.

The team built an MRI recipe for scanning autistic brains after death. They used a proton-density sequence. This keeps a 3-D picture before the brain is sliced.

No people were treated. The paper is a methods guide.

The protocol worked. It gave a clear, permanent map of the whole brain. The scan can later be matched to tiny tissue slices.

Matson et al. (2011) looked at the same brains, but under a microscope. They found disorganized layers in the posterior cingulate. The MRI map from Richman et al. (2001) shows where those layers sit before you cut.

Totsika et al. (2023) review newer live-brain MRI tricks like arterial-spin labeling. They say the old post-mortem map is still key for checking findings.

Abulebda et al. (2018) sedate living autistic kids for MRI. Their work needs the brain to stay alive. Richman et al. (2001) is for when the brain is no longer alive, so the two methods do not clash—they fill different gaps.

If you work with neuroimaging data, this 2001 protocol is the reference for matching autistic brain scans to later tissue work. Share the 3-D file with pathologists so every slice has a GPS coordinate. This keeps your data set clean and comparable across labs.