Brain atlases and neuroanatomic imaging

Methods Mol Biol. 2007:401:183-94. doi: 10.1007/978-1-59745-520-6_11.

Abstract

Quantifying the effect of a genetic manipulation or disease is a complicated process in a population of animals. Probabilistic brain atlases can capture population variability and be used to quantify those variations in anatomy as measured by structural imaging. Minimum deformation atlases (MDAs), a subclass of probabilistic atlases, are intensity-based averages of a collection of scans in a common space unbiased by selection of a single target image. Here, we describe a method for generating an MDA from a set of magnetic resonance microscopy images. First, the images are segmented to remove any non-brain tissue and bias field corrected to remove field inhomogeneities. The corrected images are then linearly aligned to a representative scan, the geometric mean of all the transformations is calculated, and a minimum deformation target (MDT) is produced by averaging the volumes in this new space. The brains are then non-linearly aligned to the MDT to produce the MDA. Finally, the images are linearly aligned to the MDA using a full-affine transformation to spatially and intensity normalize them, removing global differences in size, shape, and position but retaining anatomically significant differences.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Review

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Brain / anatomy & histology*
  • Brain Mapping*
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging*
  • Neuroanatomy*