Construction of spatiotemporal infant cortical surface atlas of rhesus macaque

Abstract

As a widely used animal model in MR imaging studies, rhesus macaque helps to better understand both normal and abnormal neural development in the human brain. However, the available adult macaque brain atlases are not well suitable for study of brain development at the early postnatal stage, since this stage undergoes dramatic changes in brain appearances and structures. Building age matched atlases for this critical period is thus highly desirable yet still lacking. In this paper, we construct the first spatiotemporal (4D) cortical surface atlases for rhesus macaques from 2 weeks to 24 months, using 138 longitudinal MRI scans from 32 healthy rhesus monkeys. Specifically, we first perform intra-subject cortical surface registration to obtain within-subject mean cortical surfaces. Then, we perform inter-subject registration of within-subject mean surfaces to obtain unbiased and longitudinally-consistent 4D cortical surface atlases. Based on our 4D rhesus monkey atlases, we further chart the first developmental-trajectories-based parcellation maps using the local surface area and spectral clustering algorithm. Our 4D macaque surface atlases and parcellation maps will greatly facilitate early brain development studies of macaques.

Mapping hemispheric asymmetries of the macaque cerebral cortex during early brain development

“…To process longitudinal brain MR images, we followed an infant‐specific computational pipeline for cortical surface‐based analysis (Wang et al, ). First, we rigidly aligned all T2‐weighted images onto their corresponding T1‐weighted images, and resampled all images to be isotropic with the resolution of 0.55 × 0.55 × 0.55 mm 3 .…”

“…To study longitudinal hemispheric asymmetries, we need to establish both longitudinal (intrasubject) and cross‐sectional (intersubject) vertex‐to‐vertex cortical correspondences. We first established longitudinal cortical correspondences for each subject by unbiased group‐wise registration of all longitudinal spherical surfaces, including both the left and mirror‐flipped right hemispheres, and then accordingly generated the intrasubject mean cortical folding map using spherical demons (Yeo et al, ), as in (Li, Wang, et al, ; Wang et al, ). For establishing cross‐sectional cortical correspondences, we further group‐wisely aligned the intrasubject mean cortical folding maps of all subjects and then generated the group‐mean cortical folding maps accordingly.…”

“…However, due to difficulties in analyzing the brain MRI data of macaque monkeys during infancy, which typically exhibits low tissue contrast and dynamic imaging appearance as in human infants (Wang et al, ), our knowledge remains scarce on the spatiotemporal changes of hemispheric structural asymmetries in macaque brains during early postnatal stages (Bogart et al, ; Gannon, Kheck, & Hof, ). To fill this knowledge gap, by leveraging an infant‐dedicated computational pipeline (Wang et al, ), we perform cortical surface‐based morphometry on longitudinal MRI data from a public rhesus macaque neurodevelopment dataset with 134 scans from 32 macaques (Young et al, ). Thus, this study provides the first comprehensive longitudinal analysis of cortical hemispheric structural asymmetries in macaque monkeys at seven age groups at 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, and 19 months of age using multiple distinct cortical properties, for example, cortical surface area, cortical thickness, sulcal depth, and vertex position.…”

CIVET-Macaque: an automated pipeline for MRI-based cortical surface generation and cortical thickness in macaques

“…It is anticipated that the open usage of CIVET-macaque will promote collaborative efforts in data collection, sharing, and automated analyses from which the non-human primate brain-image field will further advance (Autio et al 2020) . For example, corticometry would provide a natural and complementary insight on longitudinal developmental studies in the macaque monkey (Scott et al 2016;Wang et al 2018) . Finally, it is our intent to share complete CIVET outputs for the INDI PRIME-DE on the PRIME-RE portal ( https://prime-re.github.io/ ) (Messinger et al, this issue).…”

“…Several cortical surface reconstructions for macaques have been presented (Koo et al 2012;Oguz et al 2015;Donahue et al 2018;Wang et al 2018;Autio et al 2020) and a few new pipelines for macaque cortical surface generation have recently been shared on the PRIME-Resource Exchange ( https://prime-re.github.io/ ) (Messinger et al, this issue ). These efforts have made surface generation less labor intensive .…”