Department of Biomedical Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, 3440 S Dearborn St, M-100, Chicago, IL 60616, United States.
Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center, Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, IL, United States.
Neuroimage. 2022 Mar;248:118869. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118869. Epub 2022 Jan 2.
Investigating the structure of the older adult brain at high spatial resolution is of high significance, and a dedicated older adult structural brain template with sub-millimeter resolution is currently lacking. Therefore, the purpose of this work was twofold: (A) to develop a 0.5mm isotropic resolution standardized T1-weighted template of the older adult brain by applying principles of super resolution to high quality MRI data from 222 older adults (65-95 years of age), and (B) to systematically compare the new template to other standardized and study-specific templates in terms of image quality and performance when used as a reference for alignment of older adult data. The new template exhibited higher spatial resolution and improved visualization of fine structural details of the older adult brain compared to a template constructed using a conventional template building approach and the same data. In addition, the new template exhibited higher image sharpness and did not contain image artifacts observed in some of the other templates considered in this work. Due to the above enhancements, the new template provided higher inter-subject spatial normalization precision for older adult data compared to the other templates, and consequently enabled detection of smaller inter-group morphometric differences in older adult data. Finally, the new template was among those that were most representative of older adult brain data. Overall, the new template constructed here is an important resource for studies of aging, and the findings of the present work have important implications in template selection for investigations on older adults.
高空间分辨率研究老年人大脑结构具有重要意义,但目前缺乏具有亚毫米分辨率的专门老年人大脑结构模板。因此,这项工作的目的有两个:(A)通过将超分辨率原理应用于 222 名老年人大脑(65-95 岁)的高质量 MRI 数据,开发出具有 0.5 毫米各向同性分辨率的老年人大脑标准化 T1 加权模板;(B)系统地比较新模板与其他标准化和特定于研究的模板在用作老年人大脑数据配准参考时的图像质量和性能。与使用传统模板构建方法和相同数据构建的模板相比,新模板显示出更高的空间分辨率和更好的老年人大脑精细结构细节的可视化效果。此外,新模板显示出更高的图像锐度,并且没有包含本工作中考虑的其他一些模板中观察到的图像伪影。由于上述增强,新模板为老年人大脑数据提供了比其他模板更高的受试者间空间归一化精度,从而能够检测到老年人大脑数据中更小的组间形态差异。最后,新模板是最能代表老年人大脑数据的模板之一。总体而言,这里构建的新模板是研究衰老的重要资源,本工作的发现对老年人大脑研究中的模板选择具有重要意义。