2019/12/17 by Charles W. Iglehart, Martin M. Monti, Iglehart, Charles +7
Medicine · Neuroscience · #Advanced Neuroimaging Techniques and Applications #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Functional Brain Connectivity Studies #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Neonatal and fetal brain pathology #Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1912.08343
openalex publication_date 2019/12/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The thalamus consists of several histologically and functionally distinct\nnuclei increasingly implicated in brain pathology and important for treatment,\nmotivating the need for development of fast and accurate thalamic segmentation.\nThe contrast between thalamic nuclei as well as between the thalamus and\nsurrounding tissues is poor in T1 and T2 weighted magnetic resonance imaging\n(MRI), inhibiting efforts to date to segment the thalamus using standard\nclinical MRI. Automatic segmentation techniques have been developed to leverage\nthalamic features better captured by advanced MRI methods, including\nmagnetization prepared rapid acquisition gradient echo (MP-RAGE) , diffusion\ntensor imaging (DTI), and resting state functional MRI (fMRI). Despite\noperating on fundamentally different image features, these methods claim a high\ndegree of agreement with the Morel stereotactic atlas of the thalamus. However,\nno comparison has been undertaken to compare the results of these disparate\nsegmentation methods. We have implemented state-of-the-art structural,\ndiffusion, and functional imaging-based thalamus segmentation techniques and\nused them on a single set of subjects. We present the first systematic\nqualitative and quantitative comparison of these methods. We found that\nfunctional connectivity-based parcellation exhibited a close correspondence\nwith structural parcellation on the basis of qualitative concordance with the\nMorel thalamic atlas as well as the quantitative measures of Dice scores and\nvolumetric similarity index.\n