Local Normalization: (A) (Left) Prior to local normalization,  1000 pairs of patches in homotopic (hom) cortical locations across HVs have increased cosine similarity compared to 1000 pairs of randomly selected heterotopic (het) patches.  Patches across FCD lesions (1000 pairs) (FCD) have increased cosine similarity compared to randomly selected heterotopic patches in HVs.  FCD patches compared to homotopic patches are more similar to each other than to randomly selected patches in HVs (FCD-Het vs FCD-Hom). Following local normalization, cosine similarity between pairs of homotopic and heterotopic patches in HVs, as well as between FCD patches and HV patches in any location are similar and are centered around 0, while cosine similarity between FCD patches remains elevated. (B) Using the first two SVD components from the FCD patches as the axes, we plotted the location of: 1) each FCD patch (light red small dots); 2) the center of each individual FCD lesion (larger dots: MRI+ dark red, MRI- light red); and 3) the overall average FCD center across all subjects (black) compared to the insular ROI center (green), precentral ROI center (blue), and 1000 randomly sampled HV patches (purple). Following local normalization, the distribution of random cortical patches can be seen to become smaller, the insula and premotor ROI centers move to the center, and the FCD patches remain as outliers. (C)  The mean feature vector for a single exemplar FCD lesion (red) is plotted along with homotopic patches in 30 HVs (purple).  FCD similarity is measured by projecting each patch onto the FCD unit vector (light red arrow). The same exemplar FCD and its homotopic patches are shown after local normalization; the homotopic patch locations move to be centered around the origin and the FCD vector moves farther from the center, with a higher value when projected onto the mean FCD direction. (D) FCD similarity map is shown for the patient in (C). The frontal lesion appears similar before and after local normalization, while outlying regions such as the anterior insula no longer appear similar after local normalization.