Tesla MRI Brain White Matter Atlas
Abstract and Summary
One of the most important advances in the field of neuroscience and brain-related research is the development of visualizing techniques for the human nervous system, such as brain atlases in vivo. MRI white matter tractography and track densitogram are examples of such recent advances and have been of great interest since the early development of MRI in the mid-1980s. Diffusion tensor imaging, also known as DTI, has been actively studied for over the last two decades or so and succeeded in obtaining markedly improved representations of the fiber or white matter tracts of the human nervous system, both in vivo as well as from cadaver brain. White matter tractography, however, suffered a number of difficulties, such as shortcomings in the detection of fiber crossings and detection of small fibers, mainly due to the limited sensitivity, resolution, and the techniques commonly used today. Improvements to white matter tractography, therefore, require high sensitivity as well as new tractographic techniques for better visualization of the fine details of the fiber density, as well as their distributions in the human brain. In this respect, two important developments have emerged in this field, namely, the ultra-high-field (UHF) 7.0 T MRI and the new image post-processing technique known as track density imaging (TDI). These two developments are the two major components of this new white matter imaging atlas. In this book, we have improved the imaging of white matter by advancement of the two major aspects mentioned earlier, namely, improvement of the sensitivity and resolution of the acquired diffusion MRI data by using the UHF 7.0 T MRI and improvement of visualization and further increase in spatial resolution with the newly developed super-resolution white matter tract density imaging technique, the super-resolution TDI technique.