ATLAS [HOT] Free Download (v534.5)

Magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) can capture the variation of cerebral arteries with high spatial resolution. These measurements include valuable information about the morphology, geometry, and density of brain arteries, which may be useful to identify risk factors for cerebrovascular and neurological diseases at an early time point. However, this requires knowledge about the distribution and morphology of vessels in healthy subjects. The statistical arterial brain atlas described in this work is a free and public neuroimaging resource that can be used to identify vascular morphological changes. The atlas was generated based on 544 freely available multi-center MRA and T1-weighted MRI datasets. The arteries were automatically segmented in each MRA dataset and used for vessel radius quantification. The binary segmentation and vessel size information were non-linearly registered to the MNI brain atlas using the T1-weighted MRI datasets to construct atlases of artery occurrence probability, mean artery radius, and artery radius standard deviation. This public neuroimaging resource improves the understanding of the distribution and size of arteries in the healthy human brain.

ATLAS Free Download (v534.5)

The aim of this work was to generate a free and publicly available statistical cerebroarterial atlas using a dataset large enough to cover the inter-individual variability, also across age. More precisely, this atlas was generated using 3D time-of-flight (TOF) MRA images of healthy subjects, acquired at different centers with a variety of scanners. The TOF MRA is a particularly useful imaging modality for this purpose as it typically does not require any contrast agent and offers a good blood-to-background contrast of arteries. The TOF MRA sequence provides a high level of anatomical information, which is needed to evaluate the complex vascular network and enables the detection of cerebrovascular diseases6. The use of multi-center data acquired from healthy adults across the whole age spectrum allows a better representation of the true variability of the arteries in the brain and makes it more compatible with any other new dataset.

The NIfTI data format allows using the atlas data in tools used for neuroimage analysis such as Slicer, FreeSurfer, or FSL. Multiple freely available tools can be used for registration such as NiftyReg used in this work or Advanced Normalization Tools (ANTs). For artery segmentation and analysis in individual TOF MRA datasets, freely available software tools such as the Vascular Modeling Toolkit could be used. 041b061a72