Multi-contrast unbiased MRI atlas of a Parkinson's disease population.
OBJECTIVE
Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second leading neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer's disease. In PD research and its surgical treatment, such as deep brain stimulation (DBS), anatomical structural identification and references for spatial normalization are essential, and human brain atlases/templates are proven highly instrumental. 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 suboptimal surgical plans for DBS surgery and biased analysis for morphological studies. Second, commonly used mono-contrast templates lack sufficient image contrast for some subcortical structures (i.e., subthalamic nucleus) and 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 groupwise registration to create co-registered multi-contrast (T1w, T2*w, T1-T2* fusion, phase, and an R2* map) unbiased templates from 15 PD patients, and a high-resolution histology-derived 3D atlas is co-registered. For validation, these 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. By one-way ANOVA tests, our templates significantly ([Formula: see text]) outperform the Colin27 template in the registration-based tasks.


CONCLUSIONS
The proposed unbiased templates are more representative of the population of interest and can benefit both the surgical planning and research of PD.
McConnell Brain Imaging Center, Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, 3801 University Street, Montreal, QC, H3A 2B4, Canada, yiming.xiao@mail.mcgill.ca.
Yiming
Y
Xiao
Vladimir
V
Fonov
Silvain
S
Bériault
Fahd
F
Al Subaie
M Mallar
MM
Chakravarty
Abbas F
AF
Sadikot
G Bruce
GB
Pike
D Louis
DL
Collins
D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology*; D003287:Contrast Media; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000175:diagnosis*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012189:Retrospective Studies
D003287:Contrast Media