Functional atlas of the rat brain: Automatic structure assignment for evaluation of BOLD fMRI

Abstract

For functional mapping of human brain activity the Talairach atlas provides the spatial reference system for structure identification of activated spots. No such common reference system exists for fMRI studies on animals. Therefore, the aim of this study was to establish a set of different image processing algorithms in order to generate for a given stimulation paradigm a functional standard atlas of the rat brain. The goal, which should be achieved, was an automatic identification and structure assignment of activated voxel groups based on such a labelled standard atlas. Due to the smooth brain structure of rodents even basic affine registration techniques greatly reduce the interindividual variations in brains and activated structures and allowed precise identification and labelling of the activated structures.