School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, 393 Huaxia Road, Shanghai, 201210, China.
Department of Radiology of The Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, 88 Jiefang Road, Hangzhou, 310009, Zhejiang, China.
Brain Struct Funct. 2023 Jun;228(5):1045-1067. doi: 10.1007/s00429-022-02547-1. Epub 2022 Aug 29.
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 the magnetic susceptibility of human brain tissues. Compared to traditional structural imaging, QSM provides superiority for imaging the iron-rich DBN owing to the susceptibility difference existing between brain tissues. In this study, we constructed 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 was guided by hybrid images that were fused from multi-modal magnetic resonance images (MRI). We named it 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 subregions that are highly related to neurological and psychiatric pathology were then manually labeled based on the atlas set with the assistance of an image border-enhancement process. Especially, the bilateral thalamus was delineated into 64 detailed subregions referring to the Schaltenbrand-Wahren stereotactic atlas. To our best knowledge, the histological-consistent thalamic nucleus parcellation map is well defined for the first time in the MNI space. Compared with existing atlases that emphasizing DBN parcellation, the newly proposed atlas outperforms on the task of atlas-guided individual brain image DBN segmentation both in accuracy and robustness. Moreover, we applied the proposed DBN parcellation map to conduct detailed identification of the pathology-related iron content alterations in subcortical nuclei for Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients. We envision that the MuSus-100 atlas can 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.
富含铁的深部脑核（DBN）参与各种运动、情绪和认知脑功能。DBN 中的异常铁改变与多种神经和精神疾病密切相关。定量磁化率映射（QSM）提供了人脑组织磁化率的空间分布。与传统的结构成像相比，QSM 由于脑组织之间存在磁化率差异，为成像富含铁的 DBN 提供了优势。在这项研究中，我们通过对 100 名年龄在 19-29 岁的健康受试者进行组间配准，构建了一个蒙特利尔神经学研究所（MNI）无偏 QSM 人脑图谱。图谱构建过程由融合了多模态磁共振图像（MRI）的混合图像指导。我们将其命名为多模态融合磁化率（MuSus-100）图谱。高质量的磁化率图谱提供了富含铁的 DBN 及其周围环境之间极好的图像对比。然后，在图谱集的协助下，通过图像边界增强过程，根据与神经和精神病理学高度相关的 DBN 和其亚区的分割图，手动标记 DBN 及其亚区。特别是，双侧丘脑被划分为 64 个详细的亚区，参考了 Schaltenbrand-Wahren 立体定向图谱。据我们所知，首次在 MNI 空间中定义了与组织学一致的丘脑核区划分图谱。与强调 DBN 分割的现有图谱相比，新提出的图谱在图谱引导的个体脑图像 DBN 分割任务上具有更高的准确性和鲁棒性。此外，我们应用所提出的 DBN 分区图对帕金森病（PD）患者的皮质下核中铁含量改变的相关病理学进行详细识别。我们设想 MuSus-100 图谱可以在提高 DBN 分割的准确性方面发挥关键作用，用于研究神经和精神疾病的进展，也有助于深部脑刺激手术中的靶点规划。
