A magnetic resonance image based atlas of the rabbit brain for automatic parcellation

Abstract

Rabbit brain has been used in several works for the analysis of neurodevelopment. However, there are not specific digital rabbit brain atlases that allow an automatic identification of brain regions, which is a crucial step for various neuroimage analyses, and, instead, manual delineation of areas of interest must be performed in order to evaluate a specific structure. For this reason, we propose an atlas of the rabbit brain based on magnetic resonance imaging, including both structural and diffusion weighted, that can be used for the automatic parcellation of the rabbit brain. Ten individual atlases, as well as an average template and probabilistic maps of the anatomical regions were built. In addition, an example of automatic segmentation based on this atlas is described.

This work was supported by grants: Obra Social “la Caixa,” Barcelona, Spain; the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7 under REA Grant Agreement n° 217911 (u-Volumes); AGAUR 2009 SGR Grant n° 1099; and Sara Borrell and Rio Hortega grants from Carlos III Institute of Health, Spain (CD11/00048 to E.M. and CM11/00032 to M.I). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.