Development and evaluation of MIITRA T1w and DTI brain templates at 0.5 mm resolution

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundAn MRI multimodal older adult brain atlas with high spatial resolution is in high demand. As part of the Multichannel Illinois Institute of Technology & Rush university Aging (MIITRA) atlas project, this work aimed to develop high quality 0.5mm resolution T1‐weighted (T1w) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) multimodal templates using data from a large, diverse, community cohort of non‐demented older adults and quantitatively evaluate the new templates.MethodTemplate construction: T1w and DTI data were collected on 400 non‐demented older adults (50% male;64.9‐98.9 yrs;54% white,43% black) participating in longitudinal cohort studies of aging (Bennett et al.,2018; Barnes et al.,2012) with two 3T MRI scanners.First, a recently introduced approach for the development of high quality multimodal templates (Wu et al., 2019) was conducted in a 0.5mm isotropic resolution space to maximize the quality and anatomical consistency of the templates. Then an approach for the development of high spatial resolution templates based on principles of super‐resolution (Niaz et al., 2019) was used to eliminate interpolations in conventional template building methods. The resulting templates are named MIITRA templates. Evaluation: T1w and DTI data on 202 non‐demented older adults from ADNI3 were used for evaluation. The MIITRA templates were compared to other standardized templates in terms of the accuracy of inter‐subject spatial normalization and inter‐modality spatial matching of ADNI3 data achieved when each template was used as a reference for normalization.ResultVisual inspection shows that the MIITRA T1w and DTI templates with 0.5mm isotropic voxels exhibit high sharpness and are free of artifacts (Fig. 1, 2). Figures 3 and 4 demonstrate that the MIITRA templates provided higher inter‐subject spatial normalization accuracy of older adult data and required less deformation than other templates. Finally, the MIITRA T1w and DTI templates exhibited high spatial matching to each other and allowed higher inter‐modality spatial matching of normalized older adult data (Fig. 5).ConclusionThis work developed high quality 0.5mm resolution T1w and DTI templates for the MIITRA atlas using data from a large, diverse, community cohort of non‐demented older adults. The new templates allowed higher inter‐subject and inter‐modality spatial normalization of older adult data compared to other templates.