Abstract #0250

The Brainstem Navigator: a toolkit to investigate brainstem nuclei structure, function, and connectivity in living humans

Marta Bianciardi^1,2, Simone Cauzzo^1,3, Nicola Toschi^1,4, Subhranil Koley¹, Maria Guadalupe García-Gomar^1,5, and Kavita Singh¹

¹Brainstem Imaging Laboratory, Department of Radiology, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, ²Division of Sleep Medicine, Harvard University, Boston, MA, United States, ³Research Center “E. Piaggio”, School of Engineering, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, ⁴Medical Physics Section, Department of Biomedicine and Prevention, Faculty of Medicine, Tor Vergata University of Rome, Rome, Italy, ⁵Escuela Nacional de Estudios Superiores Unidad Juriquilla, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Queretaro, Mexico

Synopsis

Keywords: Software Tools, Brain, Brainstem atlas, segmentation, functional and structural connectome, 7 Tesla MRI, 3 Tesla MRI

Brainstem nuclei are deep gray matter regions involved in vital functions such as arousal/sleep/motor/sensory/autonomic/nociceptive/limbic/sensory function. Due to their small size and limited MRI contrast, these nuclei are difficult to visualize in conventional imaging of living humans. We generated and released the Brainstem Navigator toolkit, which enables the automatic identification of brainstem nuclei location in conventional and advanced MRI of living humans. It includes in-vivo probabilistic atlas labels for 31 brainstem nuclei generated by multi-contrast 7 Tesla MRI. We also developed coregistration routines optimized for the brainstem in 3 Tesla and 7 Tesla MRI data in health and disease.

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