Torsten Rohlfing, Natalie M. Zahr, Edith V. Sullivan, and Adolf Pfefferbaum M.D. “The SRI24 multichannel brain atlas: construction and applications”, Proc. SPIE 6914, Medical Imaging 2008: Image Processing, 691409 (26 March 2008); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.770441
Abstract
We present a new standard atlas of the human brain based on magnetic resonance images. The atlas was generated using unbiased population registration from high-resolution images obtained by multichannel-coil acquisition at 3T in a group of 24 normal subjects. The final atlas comprises three anatomical channels (T1-weighted, early and late spin echo), three diffusion-related channels (fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity, diffusion-weighted image), and three tissue probability maps (CSF, gray matter, white matter). The atlas is dynamic in that it is implicitly represented by nonrigid transformations between the 24 subject images, as well as distortion-correction alignments between the image channels in each subject. The atlas can, therefore, be generated at essentially arbitrary image resolutions and orientations (e.g., AC/PC aligned), without compounding interpolation artifacts. We demonstrate in this paper two different applications of the atlas: (a) region definition by label propagation in a fiber tracking study is enabled by the increased sharpness of our atlas compared with other available atlases, and (b) spatial normalization is enabled spatial normalization is enabled by its average shape property. In summary, our atlas has unique features and will be made available to the scientific community as a resource and reference system for future imaging-based studies of the human brain.