UNC-Emory Infant Atlases for Macaque Brain Image Analysis: Postnatal Brain Development through 12 Months.

Yundi Shi,Christa Payne,Jeffrey T Young,Eva Yapuncich,Mar M Sanchez,Ashley Rumple,Francois Budin,Martin A Styner,Brittany Howell,Jodi Godfrey,Xiaodong Zhang,Xiaoping Hu

doi:10.3389/fnins.2016.00617

Abstract

Computational anatomical atlases have shown to be of immense value in neuroimaging as they provide age appropriate reference spaces alongside ancillary anatomical information for automated analysis such as subcortical structural definitions, cortical parcellations or white fiber tract regions. Standard workflows in neuroimaging necessitate such atlases to be appropriately selected for the subject population of interest. This is especially of importance in early postnatal brain development, where rapid changes in brain shape and appearance render neuroimaging workflows sensitive to the appropriate atlas choice. We present here a set of novel computation atlases for structural MRI and Diffusion Tensor Imaging as crucial resource for the analysis of MRI data from non-human primate rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) data in early postnatal brain development. Forty socially-housed infant macaques were scanned longitudinally at ages 2 weeks, 3, 6, and 12 months in order to create cross-sectional structural and DTI atlases via unbiased atlas building at each of these ages. Probabilistic spatial prior definitions for the major tissue classes were trained on each atlas with expert manual segmentations. In this article we present the development and use of these atlases with publicly available tools, as well as the atlases themselves, which are publicly disseminated to the scientific community.

Highlights

Non-human primate models are widely used for comparative studies with human neuropathology (Lebherz et al, 2005; Lubach and Coe, 2006; Short et al, 2010; Shi et al, 2013)
Among non-human primate models, the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) has been the most widely studied monkey due to its phylogenetic closeness to humans (Rilling and Insel, 1999; Passingham, 2009) and the UNC-Emory Infant Macaque Atlases potential to examine more complex functions and behavior associated with encephalization (Price and Coe, 2000)
The infants lived with their mothers for the entire duration of the study and families in large social groups consisting of 75–150 adult females, their sub-adult and juvenile offspring and 2–3 males

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Non-human primate models are widely used for comparative studies with human neuropathology (Lebherz et al, 2005; Lubach and Coe, 2006; Short et al, 2010; Shi et al, 2013). Among non-human primate models, the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) has been the most widely studied monkey due to its phylogenetic closeness to humans (Rilling and Insel, 1999; Passingham, 2009) and the. Image-based reference atlases (templates) are crucial to provide information for automatic processing of MRI individual data. These atlases are used for aligning new images for the purpose of normalization into a common coordinate space (Mazziotta et al, 2001). This paper fills that void providing with MRI atlases for structural and diffusion MRI analysis at postnatal ages that expand the infant and early juvenile periods (postnatal ages 2 weeks, 3, 6, and 12 months)

MATERIALS AND METHODS

CONCLUSION