Dr. Yvonee Lui, scientist, “Ours is the first study to detect brain microstructural differences between sexes”

Outwardly, it is generally easy to distinguish a man from a woman but when we look at their brains, there is no visible difference to the naked eye. For millennia humanity has been trying to find differences in the brain based on a person sex to explain distinctive thought processes and behavior between men and women.

Purported differences have also been used to rationalize sexist beliefs that men were more capable and intelligent than women. However, as Dr. Armin Raznahan, chief of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Section on Developmental Neurogenomics, told Live Science, “I’m not aware of any measure you can make of the human brain where the male and female distributions don’t overlap.”

While that may be the case, researchers haven’t given up because there are many psychiatric and neurologic diseases that manifest differently in different sexes. “Trying to understand baseline differences can help us better understand how diseases manifest,” explained Dr. Yvonne Lui, a clinician-scientist and vice chair of research in NYU Langone’s Department of Radiology.

AI finds microstructural differences between male and female brains

Lui was coauthor of a study published in 2024 that used AI to analyze diffusion MRI scans of brains to determine the sex of the individual. In particular, the models they used focused on white matter regions where there is the most difference between men and women.

The algorithms were extremely accurate, correctly predicting the sex of a given scan between 92% and 98% of the time. Lui said that there is a “huge amount of variance in humans,” to explain the remaining gap in correct predictions.

None of the models they employed could rely on one single part of the brain, with one using 15 separate regions of white matter. However, there were consistencies and the key region was the corpus callosum, a thick C-shaped band that instantly shares data between the left and right sides of the brain.

“I believe ours is the first study to detect brain microstructural differences between sexes,” said Lui.

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