Ultra-high Resolution Structural Connectome Atlases of the Animal Brain and their Associated Toolbox

项目总结 结构连接组可以为动物大脑研究白质束提供关键信息。 并将大脑回路与实验结果联系起来。随着越来越多的神经系统疾病的动物模型 广泛用于了解疾病机制和测试可能的治疗方法，光谱分析地图集将有助于 这些研究旨在将白质通路与大脑功能或功能障碍联系起来。在这里，我们的目标是构建 以前所未有的细节绘制小鼠、大鼠和恒河猴的结构连接体图集 并开发了相关的工具箱，用于新的光谱分析。为了实现这一目标，我们成立了一个 杜克大学活体显微镜中心和DSI工作室团队之间的多学科团队 匹兹堡的。在Duke CIVM上，我们将获得超高分辨率的超张量扩散磁共振成像 小鼠、大鼠和恒河猴的大脑可以分辨复杂的轴突结构。图像采集将是 使用压缩传感加速，并使用超分辨率方法进一步重建。此外 MRI，对大鼠和小鼠脑组织进行组织清扫和光片扫描 荧光显微镜捕捉整个大脑的细胞级组织学细节。弥散磁共振成像数据将 然后在匹兹堡大学进行处理，以构建地图集和开发小说 自动轨迹成像、形状分析和捆绑分析工具箱。我们将追踪全脑路径 然后把它们捆绑在一起。我们的神经解剖学家团队将根据公众可获得的信息来验证声带成像 跟踪数据并将结果聚合到地图集中，该地图集将用于构建其关联的地图集- 基于自动牵引法和相关分析。这项研究的完成将提供一个中尺度 具有前所未有质量的集成组织学图像的结构连接体及其相关的 工具箱。结合起来的数据和工具将成为动物研究调查的宝贵资源 大脑紊乱。

PROJECT SUMMARY A structural connectome can provide critical information for animal brain studies to study white matter bundles and correlate brain circuits with experimental findings. As more animal models for neurological disorders are widely used to understand the disease mechanism and test possible treatments, tractography atlases will help those studies to correlate white matter pathways with brain function or dysfunction. Here, we aim to construct tractography atlases at unprecedented details as structural connectome for mouse, rat, and rhesus macaque and developed associated toolboxes for novel tractography analytics. To achieve this goal, we have formed a multidisciplinary team between Duke Center for In Vivo Microscopy and the "DSI Studio" team at the University of Pittsburgh. At Duke CIVM, we will acquire the ultra-high resolution "beyond-tensor" diffusion MRI on the mouse, rat, and rhesus macaque brains to resolve complicated axonal structures. The image acquisition will be accelerated using compressed sensing and further reconstructed using a super-resolution approach. Besides MRI, the rat and mouse brain tissue will be processed by tissue clearing and scanned by light-sheet fluorescence microscopy to capture cell-level histology details of the entire brain. The diffusion MRI data will then be processed at the University of Pittsburgh to construct tractography atlases and develop novel automated tractography, shape analysis, and bundle analytics toolboxes. We will track whole-brain pathways and cluster them into bundles. Our neuroanatomist team will validate tractography against publicly available tracer data and aggregate the results in tractography atlases, which will be used to build their associated atlas- based automated tractography and associated analysis. The completion of this study will provide a mesoscale structural connectome with integrated histologic images at unprecedented quality as well as their associated toolboxes. The data and tools combined will serve as invaluable resources for animal studies to investigate brain disorders.