Ultra-high resolution multimodal MRI densely labelled holistic structural brain atlas

TL;DR

This paper presents a new ultra-high resolution, multimodal, densely labelled brain atlas constructed from averaging MRI scans of 75 healthy subjects, covering multiple anatomical levels for improved neuroimaging analysis.

Contribution

The creation of a comprehensive, multiscale, multimodal brain atlas using a novel densely labelled protocol and group-wise normalization, available publicly for research.

Findings

Atlas includes 350 labels across multiple scales

Constructed from high-resolution multimodal MRI data

Enables improved segmentation and neurological disorder detection

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a novel structural holistic Atlas (holiAtlas) of the human brain anatomy based on multimodal and high-resolution MRI that covers several anatomical levels from the organ to the substructure level, using a new densely labelled protocol generated from the fusion of multiple local protocols at different scales. This atlas was constructed by averaging images and segmentations of 75 healthy subjects from the Human Connectome Project database. Specifically, MR images of T1, T2 and WMn (White Matter nulled) contrasts at 0.125 $mm^{3}$ resolution were selected for this project. The images of these 75 subjects were nonlinearly registered and averaged using symmetric group-wise normalisation to construct the atlas. At the finest level, the proposed atlas has 350 different labels derived from 7 distinct delineation protocols. These labels were grouped at multiple scales, offering a coherent and consistent holistic representation of the brain across different levels of detail. This multiscale and multimodal atlas can be used to develop new ultra-high-resolution segmentation methods, potentially improving the early detection of neurological disorders. We make it publicly available to the scientific community.