Vertical occipital fasciculus

Early discovery

Originally depicted by Carl Wernicke, who called it the senkrechte Occipitalbündel (vertical occipital bundle), the region was practically lost to scientific knowledge during the twentieth century. Theodor Meynert had described the brain's other white matter tracts as being horizontally oriented, and did not accept Wernicke's finding. Heinrich Obersteiner named the area the "fasciculus occipitalis perpendicularis", and Heinrich Sachs named the area the "stratum profundum convexitatis". It appeared in a 1918 edition of Gray's Anatomy, but fell into obscurity. A diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) study in 2004 noted an area of short-range association fibers in the lateral occipital lobe, which they noted corresponded to the VoF.