Towards a High-resolution Fiber Model of the Human Brain with 3D Polarized Light Imaging

Abstract

3D Polarized Light Imaging (3D-PLI) is a neuroimaging technique that has opened up new avenues to study the complex architecture of nerve fibers in postmortem brains. The spatial orientations of the fibers are derived from birefringence measurements of unstained histological brain sections that are interpreted by a voxel-based analysis, i.e. a single 3D fiber orientation vector is obtained for each voxel. The constituents of the methodology, such as the polarimetric setup, image processing algorithms and volume reconstruction techniques, are particularly developed to be able to address fiber mapping in the whole human brain targeting the micrometer scale. By this means 3D-PLI provides unique data sets to integrate macroscopic and microscopic descriptions of human fiber architecture gained from diffusion MRI or other microscopic approaches, respectively.