Manisha Aggarwal1, Jiangyang Zhang2, Michael I. Miller1,3, Susumu Mori2,4
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA; 2Department of Radiology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA; 3Center of Imaging Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA; 4F. M. Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA
A microCT and DTI based three dimensional stereotaxic atlas of the adult C57BL/6J mouse brain was developed, with correction of postmortem tissue distortion due to specimen fixation. A population-averaged in vivo MRI brain template was developed with estimates of anatomical variability, and was used as the reference for nonlinear deformation of the ex vivo data, to generate a distortion-corrected DTI atlas with high anatomical fidelity. The distortion-corrected DTI atlas was incorporated into the stereotaxic coordinate frame. Compared to existing histology based atlases, the distortion corrected microCT-DTI atlas provides a more accurate representation of the adult C57BL/6J brain anatomy.