Medical Physics Seminar – Monday, September 23, 2013
Diffusion Tensor Imaging In the Rhesus Macaque Brain
Elizabeth Zakszewski (student of Dr. Andrew Alexander)
Research Assistant, Department of Medical Physics, UW-School of Medicine & Public Health, Madison, WI - USA -
Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tractography is a tool for noninvasively mapping and probing the microstructure of white matter (WM) in the brain. It has great potential for use in studies of brain connectivity analyses including models of psychiatric disease. However, the validity of tractography for mapping the true underlying brain connections has not been clearly established. The rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) is a nonhuman primate species that may be studied both in-vivo and ex-vivo, making it a good translational model in these studies to provide anatomical validation of brain imaging methodologies. This work evaluates and applies DTI tractography reconstructions of white matter tracts and to create an atlas of major white matter regions in the rhesus monkey. Specifically, it provides an in-depth look at how accurately probabilistic DTI tractography can trace the same WM pathways that have traditionally been visualized with histological tracers, demonstrates applications of the same tractography methods for analyzing a connectome hub in the brain, and presents a completely novel atlas of WM structures in the rhesus that can immediately be applied to studies of many neuropsychiatric conditions.