Abstract
The thalamus consists of several histologically and functionally distinct nuclei increasingly implicated in brain pathology and important for treatment, motivating the need for development of fast and accurate thalamic parcellation. The contrast between thalamic nuclei as well as between the thalamus and surrounding tissues is poor in T1- and T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), inhibiting efforts to date to segment the thalamus using standard clinical MRI. Automatic parcellation techniques have been developed to leverage thalamic features better captured by advanced MRI methods, including magnetization prepared rapid acquisition gradient echo (MP-RAGE), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and resting-state functional MRI (fMRI). Despite operating on fundamentally different image contrasts, these methods claim a high degree of agreement with the Morel stereotactic atlas of the thalamus. However, no comparison has been undertaken to compare the results of these disparate parcellation methods. We have implemented state-of-the-art structural-, diffusion-, and functional imaging-based thalamus parcellation techniques and used them on a single set of subjects. We present the first systematic qualitative and quantitative comparison of these methods. The results show that DTI parcellation agrees more with structural parcellation in the larger thalamic nuclei, while rsfMRI parcellation agrees more with structural parcellation in the smaller nuclei. Structural parcellation is the most accurate in the delineation of small structures such as the habenular, antero-ventral, and medial geniculate nuclei.
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429_2020_2085_MOESM1_ESM.eps
Fig. 1 Axial view of maximum probability maps for structural parcellation (THOMAS), rsfMRI using the original 30 cluster output (rsfMRI 30), and rsfMRI using a modified cluster output of 11 (rsfMRI 11). The number of clusters for the modified rsfMRI parcellation was chosen to match the number of structural nuclei of interest (EPS 1397 kb)
429_2020_2085_MOESM2_ESM.eps
Fig. 2 Axial view of maximum probability maps for structural parcellation (THOMAS), DTI using the original seven cluster output (DTI 7), and DTI using a modified cluster output of 11 (DTI 11). The number of clusters for the modified DTI parcellation was chosen to match the number of structural nuclei of interest (EPS 1440 kb)
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Iglehart, C., Monti, M., Cain, J. et al. A systematic comparison of structural-, structural connectivity-, and functional connectivity-based thalamus parcellation techniques. Brain Struct Funct 225, 1631–1642 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02085-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02085-8