Palesi Fulvia, Tournier Jacques-Donald, Calamante F, Muhlert Nils, Castellazzi Gloria, Chard Declan, D'Angelo E, Wheeler-Kingshott Claudia Gandini
Funct Neurol. 2016 Oct/Dec;31(4):229-238. doi: 10.11138/fneur/2016.31.4.229.
The identification of pathways connecting the cerebral cortex with subcortical structures is critical to understanding how large-scale brain networks operate. The cerebellum, for example, is known to project numerous axonal bundles to thecerebral cortex passing through the thalamus. This paper focuses on the technical details of cerebello-thalamo-cortical pathway reconstruction using advanced diffusion MRI techniques in humans in vivo. Pathways reconstructed using seed/target placement on super-resolution maps, created with track density imaging (TDI), were compared with those reconstructed by defining regions of interest (ROIs) on non-diffusion weighted images (b0). We observed that the reconstruction of the pathways was more anatomically accurate when using ROIs placed on TDI rather than on b0 maps, while inter-subject variability and reproducibility were similar between the two methods. Diffusion indices along pathways showed a position-dependent specificity that will need to be taken into consideration in future clinical investigations.
确定连接大脑皮层与皮层下结构的通路对于理解大规模脑网络的运作方式至关重要。例如，已知小脑会投射大量轴突束，通过丘脑到达大脑皮层。本文重点介绍了在人体活体中使用先进的扩散磁共振成像技术重建小脑 - 丘脑 - 皮层通路的技术细节。将基于使用轨迹密度成像（TDI）创建的超分辨率图谱上的种子/靶点放置所重建的通路，与通过在非扩散加权图像（b0）上定义感兴趣区域（ROI）所重建的通路进行了比较。我们观察到，当使用放置在TDI上而非b0图谱上的ROI时，通路的重建在解剖学上更准确，而两种方法之间的个体间变异性和可重复性相似。沿通路的扩散指数显示出位置依赖性特异性，这在未来的临床研究中需要加以考虑。
