OHBM 2023 | 3079 | Talk | Marta Bianciardi | The Brainstem Navigator: a toolkit to study brainstem…

Title: The Brainstem Navigator: a toolkit to study brainstem nuclei structure and function in living humans.
Session: Oral Session
Speaker: Marta Bianciardi
Abstract: Brainstem nuclei are deep gray matter regions crucial in arousal/sleep, motor, sensory, autonomic, nociceptive, limbic, and sensory function. Due to their small size and limited MRI contrast, these nuclei are difficult to visualize in conventional MRI of living humans, and extrapolations from 2D postmortem brainstem atlases are often used to identify their location in in-vivo MRI, with limited precision. Our purpose was to generate and publicly release the Brainstem Navigator, a toolkit that enables the automatic identification of brainstem nuclei location in conventional (e.g. 3 Tesla) and advanced (e.g. 7 Tesla) MRI of living humans. First objective was to create a probabilistic and deformable 3D atlas of 31 brainstem nuclei by 7 Tesla multi-contrast MRI. Second objective was to develop a tutorial of coregistration routines for precise alignment of the brainstem nuclei atlas labels to diffusion and functional MRI.

[@interwebzful]

bravo, an incredible body of work. thank you!