Altered hypothalamic microstructure in human obesity

Thomas, Kevin; Beyer, Frauke; Lewe, Gesa; Zhang, Rui; Schindler, S.D.; Schönknecht, Peter; Sturmvoll, M; Villringer, Arno; Witte, A. Veronica

doi:10.1101/593004

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 68 publications

(76 reference statements)

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“…As qMRI reflects different characteristics of tissue microarchitecture, another application of MT sat., PD, R1, and R2 * in the hypothalamus could be related to physiological or psychological outcomes, (e.g., stress, psychiatric disorders, obesity) to deepen the understanding of hypothalamic plasticity in health and disease. Diffusion parameters are commonly used to investigate structure-function relationships (Chen et al, 2015;Clark et al, 2011;Poletti et al, 2020;Thomas et al, 2019), but are sensitive to changes of the diffusion process due to CSF and white matter. Still, other quantitative MRI parameters investigated the association of water content in the brain and obesity and found associations of higher body-mass index with increased water content in the hypothalamus, possibly related to inflammatory processes (Kullmann et al, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Segmentation and White Matter Extraction of the Hypothalamus

Spindler¹,

Thiel²

2020

Preprint

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Since the hypothalamus is involved in many neuroendocrine, metabolic, and affective disorders, detailed hypothalamic imaging has become of major interest to better characterize disease-induced tissue damages and abnormalities. Still, image contrast of conventional anatomical magnetic resonance imaging lacks morphological detail, thus complicating complete and precise segmentation of the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus’ position lateral to the third ventricle and close proximity to white matter tracts including the optic tract, fornix, and mammillothalamic tract display one of the remaining shortcomings of hypothalamic segmentation, as reliable exclusion of white matter is not yet possible. Recent studies found that quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI), a method to create maps of different standardized tissue contents, improved segmentation of cortical and subcortical brain regions (Carey et al., 2017). So far, this has not been tested for the hypothalamus. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the usability of qMRI and diffusion MRI for the purpose of detailed manual segmentation and data-driven parcellation of the hypothalamus and compared our results to recent state-of-the-art segmentations. Our results show that qMRI and diffusion parameters indeed differ between hypothalamic subunits, and that qMRI is helpful for hypothalamic segmentation. In addition, we provide a data-driven clustering algorithm to reliably exclude white matter from hypothalamic tissue. We propose that qMRI poses a useful addition to detailed hypothalamic segmentation and volumetry.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Segmentation and White Matter Extraction of the Hypothalamus

Spindler¹,

Thiel²

2020

Preprint

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“…Diffusion imaging has been applied within the hypothalamus (Schönknecht et al, 2013), and mean diffusivity appears to be higher in men than in women (Thomas et al, 2019). Further studies specifically aimed at determining sex differences in hypothalamic white matter structures and the dependency on testosterone and/or androgen receptors are needed to investigate this possibility.…”

Section: Panels C and D)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of sex and gonadal hormones on manually segmented hypothalamic and pituitary gland volumes in young healthy adults

Jones

Anastassiadis

Dupuis

et al. 2023

Preprint

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The hypothalamus and pituitary regulate, amongst other functions, third order endocrine systems, and their volumes have been associated with normal and pathological outcomes. Yet, there are very few studies that examine their combined structural variations in vivo. This is due, in part, to their small size and a lack of comprehensive image segmentation protocols. In the current project we acquired high-resolution T1- (1mm isotropic) and T2-weighted (0.4mm in plane resolution) 3T magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the hypothalamus and pituitary gland, as well as salivary estradiol and testosterone from 31 (17M, 14F) young healthy adults. Women reported oral contraceptive use. Image preprocessing included non-uniformity correction, signal intensity normalization and standard stereotaxic space registration. We applied a comprehensive manual segmentation protocol of the whole hypothalamus, with detailed segmentation of the pituitary stalk, the anterior and posterior pituitary gland, and the posterior bright spot. We also propose a novel medial-lateral hypothalamic parcellation into medial preoptic, periventricular (PVN), and lateral hypothalamic regions. The protocol yielded good inter- (range: 0.78-0.92) and intra-rater (range: 0.79-0.94) Dice kappa overlap coefficients. We detected sex differences of the whole hypothalamus and each hemisphere, and a trend for the right preoptic region to be larger in males than in females, with a moderate effect size. Sex differences were maintained or enhanced when covarying for estradiol, but not when covarying for testosterone. In addition, testosterone was associated with the volume of the PVN, but only in women. In summary, these results suggest that there are morphometric differences at the level of the pituitary and hypothalamus that are likely driven by central regulation of gonadal hormones. The here described protocol allows the structural investigation of neuroendocrine effects in the central nervous system.

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Volumetric analysis of the hypothalamic subunits in obstructive sleep apnea

Mohammadi,

Oghabian,

Ghaderi

et al. 2024

Brain and Behavior

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BackgroundObstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a prevalent sleep disorder that is associated with structural brain damage and cognitive impairment. The hypothalamus plays a crucial role in regulating sleep and wakefulness. We aimed to evaluate hypothalamic subunit volumes in patients with OSA.MethodsWe enrolled 30 participants (15 patients with OSA and 15 healthy controls (HC)). Patients with OSA underwent complete overnight polysomnography (PSG) examination. All the participants underwent MRI. The hypothalamic subunit volumes were calculated using a segmentation technique that trained a 3D convolutional neural network.ResultsAlthough hypothalamus subunit volumes were comparable between the HC and OSA groups (lowest p = .395), significant negative correlations were found in OSA patients between BMI and whole left hypothalamus volume (R = –0.654, p = .008), as well as between BMI and left posterior volume (R = –0.556, p = .032). Furthermore, significant positive correlations were found between ESS and right anterior inferior volume (R = 0.548, p = .042), minimum SpO2 and the whole left hypothalamus (R = 0.551, p = .033), left tubular inferior volumes (R = 0.596, p = .019), and between the percentage of REM stage and left anterior inferior volume (R = 0.584, p = .022).ConclusionsWhile there were no notable differences in the hypothalamic subunit volumes between the OSA and HC groups, several important correlations were identified in the OSA group. These relationships suggest that factors related to sleep apnea severity could affect hypothalamic structure in patients.

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Altered hypothalamic microstructure in human obesity

Cited by 3 publications

References 68 publications

Quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Segmentation and White Matter Extraction of the Hypothalamus

Quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Segmentation and White Matter Extraction of the Hypothalamus

Effects of sex and gonadal hormones on manually segmented hypothalamic and pituitary gland volumes in young healthy adults

Volumetric analysis of the hypothalamic subunits in obstructive sleep apnea

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