Quantitative susceptibility atlas construction in Montreal Neurological Institute space: towards histological-consistent iron-rich deep brain nucleus subregion identification

Abstract

Iron-rich deep brain nuclei (DBN) of the human brain are involved in various motoric, emotional and cognitive brain functions. The abnormal iron alterations in the DBN are closely associated with multiple neurological and psychiatric diseases. Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) provides the spatial distribution of tissue magnetic susceptibility in the human brain. Compared to traditional structural imaging, QSM has superiority for imaging the iron-rich DBN owing to the susceptibility difference existing between brain tissues. In this study, we construct a Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) space unbiased QSM human brain atlas via group-wise registration from 100 healthy subjects aged 19-29 years. The atlas construction process is guided by hybrid images that fused from multi-modal Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI), thus named as Multi-modal-fused magnetic Susceptibility (MuSus-100) atlas. The high-quality susceptibility atlas provides extraordinary image contrast between iron-rich DBN with their surroundings. Parcellation maps of DBN and their sub-regions that are highly related to neurological and psychiatric pathology are then manually labeled based on the atlas set with the assistance of an image border-enhancement process. Especially, the bilateral thalamus is delineated into 64 detailed sub-regions referring to the Schaltenbrand and Wahren stereotactic atlas. To our best knowledge, the histological-consistent thalamic nucleus parcellation map is well defined for the first time in MNI space. Comparing with existing atlases emphasized on DBN parcellation, the newly proposed atlas outperforms on atlas-guided individual brain image DBN segmentation accuracy and robustness. Moreover, we apply the proposed DBN parcellation map to conduct detailed identification of the pathologyrelated iron content alterations in subcortical nuclei for Parkinson Disease (PD) patients. We envision that the MuSus-100 atlas could play a crucial role in improving the accuracy of DBN segmentation for the research of neurological and psychiatric disease progress and also be helpful for target planning in deep brain stimulation surgery.

Aberrant dentato‐rubro‐thalamic pathway in action tremor but not rest tremor: A multi‐modality magnetic resonance imaging study

“…To visualize the spatial locations of two types of fiber bundles, all tracts of interest were normalized into the b0 template space using linear interpolation after native thresholding, and the group specificity map of each group was obtained by adding the fiber bundle probability values of all subjects in the same group. Then, we used the MNI space of the ICBM‐152 brain template to observe the spatial relationship between two types of DRTT tracts and the thalamic ventral intermediate nucleus (VIM) 35 (Figure 3 and Figure S3), and the coordinates of the probability peak points of the fiber bundle in each group of people were obtained (Table 2).…”

Dysfunctional Coupling of Cerebral Blood Flow and Susceptibility Value in the Bilateral Hippocampus is Associated with Cognitive Decline in Nondialysis Patients with CKD

“…The atlas construction process mainly includes three steps: individual alignment of T1-weighted and QSM images, native space atlas construction, and MNI space projection. 48 First, the T1 structural images of each participant were coregistered to the first echo amplitude image acquired using a multiecho gradient echo sequence. Second, the native space atlas derived from an averaged template according to a data set of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans was constructed by group-wise registration, and the warped multimodal individual images were averaged to construct the native QSM atlas.…”

Sub‐voxel quantitative susceptibility mapping for assessing whole‐brain magnetic susceptibility from ages 4 to 80

“…Next, the longitudinal registration was applied to co-register each agespecific atlas to the MuSus-100 atlas (C. He et al, 2022) in Montreal…”

“…It has also been demonstrated that myelination occurs during brain development and demyelination occurs in white matter (WM)-related diseases (Bartzokis et al, 2007;Connor, 2004). The validity of QSM as a suitable in vivo imaging technique to map the temporal trajectories of iron and myelin in normal brain development has been demonstrated in earlier studies (Betts et al, 2016;C. He et al, 2022).…”