Non-human Primate Brain Network Connection Atlas Based On Diffusion Tensor

The brain is one of the most complex organs in the human body.Multiple brain regions in the brain operate in coordination and efficiently integrate information and division of labor,forming a complex brain network.Among them,as an important part of the central nervous system,white matter is mainly responsible for the information transmission in the brain network.Many major brain diseases are often manifested as the disorder of brain network in the early stage,such as autism,depression,etc.Therefore,the research on brain network is the focus and hotspot of current neuroscience research.Diffusion tensor imaging is able to show brain white matter and brain structure network in vivo and non-invasively,based on the three-dimensional displacement distribution of water molecules in the brain.DTI technique provides a powerful method to the research of cerebral white matter and it has been widely applied in the basic research of preoperative assessment,major brain disease and brain structural network.However,it is different from the traditional magnetic resonance imaging,researchers cannot directly observe the white matter and brain structure network by reading medical images.Therefore,data analysis is the key to the application of DTI imaging technology in the study of brain diseases.Currently,the commonly used methods include quantitative calculation,fiber tracking,network construction and so on.Animal experiments play an important role in the research of neuroscience.Among them,rhesus monkeys,with highly similar behavioral and biological characteristics to humans,are increasingly used in the basic research of major brain diseases.Compared with traditional experimental methods such as tissue sections,DTI imaging of model macaques in vivo can not only greatly reduce the experimental cost,but also comprehensively study the changes of white matter and brain structure network during the occurrence and development of major brain diseases by means of horizontal comparison and longitudinal tracking.With the extensive development of rhesus monkey DTI brain imaging experiments at home and abroad,how toeffectively analyze its data has become an urgent problem to be solved.In order to conduct objective data analysis on rhesus monkey DTI brain imaging,the rhesus monkey brain white matter atlas and diffusion tensor brain templates with a representative population need to be established first.Rhesus monkey brain atlas is helpful to explore the functional characteristics of the brain and to understand the brain structure.It is a bridge between biomedicine and medical imaging,and is of great importance to the analysis of the brain anatomical network.The network based on whole white matter fiber can quantitatively analyze the topology properties of brain network and fiber connection.At present,the study of rhesus monkey brain atlas is not comprehensive and the morphological structure,direction and connection of three-dimensional white matter fibers can not be described accurately and in vivo.There are few studies on the white matter network in rhesus monkeys.Therefore,this paper focused on the construction and analysis of diffusion tensor brain templates,white matter atlas and white matter network was proposed.In this paper,on the basis of overseas and domestic research status,this paper took thirty healthy rhesus monkeys as the research objects and carried out the following research work:First,DWI standardization method based on the q space was proposed to to register DTI images into the standard space.The macaque FA,MD,b0 brain templates based on diffusion tensor were established.Second,the whole white matter fibers in the standard space were obtained by using the deterministic fiber tracking algorithm,the main white matter fibers were manually drawn by virtual segmentation,and the white matter fiber maps of thirty rhesus monkeys were averaged to constructe the macaque brain white matter atlas.The white matter atlas based DTI can describe the three-dimensional white matter fibers well,and it is applied to extract a specific kind of fibers for quantitative analysis.It is widely used to assist brain surgery in the field of neuroscience.Thirdly,on the basis of the previous two parts,the established standard brain atlas of the rhesus monkey was used to construct the rhesus macaques cerebral white matter network based on fiber tracking,the global and local efficiency,small-world properties of the network were analyzed.Moreover,the module division of the macaque cerebral white matter network was conducted,and the hub nodes of the network were further analyzed.Brain white matter network of the rhesus monkey based on fiber tracking is beneficial to the study for modularization of brain network and core brain regions,realization of complex brain function.