DEMO

Multi-contrast unbiased MRI atlas of a PD population

Purpose: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neuro-degenerative disease most common in the elderly population. Human brain atlases/templates facilitate anatomical structural identification. Such templates can also serve as references for spatial normalization in both PD research and pre-surgical planning of deep brain stimulation (DBS)，an alternative treatment for medication-resistant PD. However, two shortcomings affect current templates used for PD. First, many templates are derived from a single healthy subject that is not sufficiently representative of the PD population anatomy. This may result in sub-optimal surgical plans for DBS surgery and biased analysis for morphological studies. Second, the commonly seen mono-contrast templates lack of good MRI contrast for some subcortical structures (i.e. subthalamic nucleus) and the biochemical information (i.e. iron content), a valuable feature in current PD research.

Methods: We employed a novel T1-T2* fusion MRI that visualizes both cortical and subcortical structures to drive group-wise registration to create co-registered multi-contrast (T1w, T2*w, T1-T2* fusion, phase, and an R2* map) unbiased templates, to which a high-resolution histology-derived 3D atlas is registered. For validation, the templates are compared against the Colin27 template for landmark registration and midbrain nuclei segmentation. Results: While the T1w, T2*w, and T1-T2* fusion templates provide excellent anatomical details for both cortical and subcortical structures, the phase and R2* map contain the biochemical features. Also, our templates outperform the Colin27 template in the registration-based tasks.

Conclusion: The proposed unbiased templates are more representative of the population of interest, and can benefit both the surgical planning and research of PD.

The MRI templates can be downloaded here