Abstract
Standard templates are widely used in human neuroimaging processing pipelines to facilitate group-level analyses and comparisons across subjects/populations. MNI-ICBM152 template is the most commonly used standard template, representing an average of 152 healthy young adult brains. However, in patients with neurodegenerative diseases such as frontotemporal dementia (FTD), high atrophy levels lead to significant differences between individuals’ brain shapes and MNI-ICBM152 template. Such differences might inevitably lead to registration errors or subtle biases in downstream analyses and results. Disease-specific templates are therefore desirable to reflect the anatomical characteristics of the populations of interest and reduce potential registration errors. Here, we present MNI-FTD136, MNI-bvFTD70, MNI-svFTD36, and MNI-pnfaFTD30, four unbiased average templates of 136 FTD patients, 70 behavioural variant (bv), 36 semantic variant (sv), and 30 progressive nonfluent aphasia (pnfa) variant FTD patients and a corresponding age-matched template of 133 controls (MNI-CN133), along with probabilistic tissue maps for each template. Public availability of these templates will facilitate analyses of FTD cohorts and enable comparisons between different studies in an appropriate common standardized space.
Highlights
Background & SummaryMost brain image processing pipelines use average templates as a target for registration, to enable use of prior anatomical information and to obtain a common coordinate system based on which they can perform group level analyses and comparisons[1,2,3,4]
Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a clinical categorization describing a heterogenous group of progressive neurodegenerative clinical syndromes associated with atrophy of the frontal and/or anterior temporal lobes
FTD is divided into three major clinical syndromes: the behavioral variant characterised by prominent early behavioral and personality changes, and the two language variants: the semantic variant and the non-fluent primary progressive aphasia
Summary
Most brain image processing pipelines use average templates as a target for registration, to enable use of prior anatomical information and to obtain a common coordinate system based on which they can perform group level analyses and comparisons[1,2,3,4]. Age appropriate and disease specific templates are desirable to reflect the overall anatomical differences between the populations of interest and average young healthy adult brains, and to reduce potential registration errors and biases when processing data from such populations. SvFTD shows primarily anterior and inferior temporal atrophy, distribution of atrophy in pfnaFTD frequently involves the inferior frontal gyrus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, superior temporal gyrus and insula. These differences have been used to classify FTD variants at individual subject level, with accuracies ranging between 72–91%9–14. The public availability of these templates will facilitate analysis of FTD cohorts and enable comparisons between different studies in a common standardized space appropriate to FTD populations
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