HybraPD atlas: Towards precise subcortical nuclei segmentation using multimodality medical images in patients with Parkinson disease

• Published in: Human brain mapping 2021-09, Vol.42 (13), p.4399-4421
• Main Authors: Yu, Boliang, Li, Ling, Guan, Xiaojun, Xu, Xiaojun, Liu, Xueling, Yang, Qing, Wei, Hongjiang, Zuo, Chuantao, Zhang, Yuyao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Aged; Atlases as Topic; Basal Ganglia - diagnostic imaging; Brain; Brain mapping; Brain research; Contrast agents; Contrast media; Deep brain stimulation; Emission analysis; Female; Globus pallidus; Humans; Image contrast; Image processing; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted - methods; Image segmentation; Magnetic resonance imaging; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Male; Medical imaging; Middle Aged; Movement disorders; Multimodal Imaging - methods; Neurodegenerative diseases; neuroimaging; Neuroimaging - methods; Nuclei; Parkinson Disease - diagnostic imaging; Parkinson's disease; Patients; Positron emission; Positron emission tomography; Positron-Emission Tomography - methods; Substantia alba; Substantia nigra; Substantia Nigra - diagnostic imaging; Subthalamic Nucleus - diagnostic imaging; Thalamic Nuclei - diagnostic imaging; Tomography
• ISSN: 1065-9471; 1097-0193
• DOI: 10.1002/hbm.25556

Human brain atlases are essential for research and surgical treatment of Parkinson's disease (PD). For example, deep brain stimulation for PD often requires human brain atlases for brain structure identification. However, few atlases can provide disease‐specific subcortical structures for PD, and most of them are based on T1w and T2w images. In this work, we construct a HybraPD atlas using fused quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) and T1w images from 87 patients with PD. The constructed HybraPD atlas provides a series of templates, that is, T1w, GRE magnitude, QSM, R2*, and brain tissue probabilistic maps. Then, we manually delineate a parcellation map with 12 bilateral subcortical nuclei, which are highly related to PD pathology, such as sub‐regions in globus pallidus and substantia nigra. Furthermore, we build a whole‐brain parcellation map by combining existing cortical parcellation and white‐matter segmentation with the proposed subcortical nuclei map. Considering the multimodality of the HybraPD atlas, the segmentation accuracy of each nucleus is evaluated using T1w and QSM templates, respectively. The results show that the HybraPD atlas provides more accurate segmentation than existing atlases. Moreover, we analyze the metabolic difference in subcortical nuclei between PD patients and healthy control subjects by applying the HybraPD atlas to calculate uptake values of contrast agents on positron emission tomography (PET) images. The atlas‐based analysis generates accurate disease‐related brain nuclei segmentation on PET images. The newly developed HybraPD atlas could serve as an efficient template to study brain pathological alterations in subcortical regions for PD research. We construct a HybraPD atlas using fused quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) and T1w images from 87 patients with PD. Based on the proposed templates, we manually delineate a parcellation map with 12 bilateral subcortical nuclei, which are highly related to PD pathology, such as globus pallidus (GP) and substantia nigra (SN). We also analyze the metabolic difference in subcortical nuclei between PD patients and healthy control subjects by applying the HybraPD atlas to calculate uptake values of contrast agents on PET images.