Bridging Neuroanatomy, Neuroradiology and Neurology: Three-Dimensional Interactive Atlas of Neurological Disorders

Abstract

Understanding brain pathology along with the underlying neuroanatomy and the resulting neurological deficits is of vital importance in medical education and clinical practice. To facilitate and expedite this understanding, we created a three-dimensional (3D) interactive atlas of neurological disorders providing the correspondence between a brain lesion and the resulting disorder(s). The atlas contains a 3D highly parcellated atlas of normal neuroanatomy along with a brain pathology database. Normal neuroanatomy is divided into about 2,300 components, including the cerebrum, cerebellum, brainstem, spinal cord, arteries, veins, dural sinuses, tracts, cranial nerves (CN), white matter, deep gray nuclei, ventricles, visual system, muscles, glands and cervical vertebrae (C1-C5). The brain pathology database contains 144 focal and distributed synthesized lesions (70 vascular, 36 CN-related, and 38 regional anatomy-related), each lesion labeled with the resulting disorder and associated signs, symptoms, and/or syndromes compiled from materials reported in the literature. The initial view of each lesion was preset in terms of its location and size, surrounding surface and sectional (magnetic resonance) neuroanatomy, and labeling of lesion and neuroanatomy. In addition, a glossary of neurological disorders was compiled and for each disorder materials from textbooks were included to provide neurological description. This atlas of neurological disorders is potentially useful to a wide variety of users ranging from medical students, residents and nurses to general practitioners, neuroanatomists, neuroradiologists and neurologists, as it contains both normal (surface and sectional) brain anatomy and pathology correlated with neurological disorders presented in a visual and interactive way.

Comprehensive cellular‐resolution atlas of the adult human brain

“…The most commonly used cytoarchitecture‐based human brain atlas is Brodmann's cortical map (Brodmann, ; Talairach and Tournoux, ; Simić and Hof, ), particularly for its use in annotating fMRI data, although von Economo's (von Economo and Koskinas, ) and Sarkisov's (Sarkisov et al, ) cortical maps are also still referenced. More recently developed large‐scale atlases possess greater anatomical coverage and multimodal information content, but are generally limited by their degree of structural delineation, particularly for neocortical areas that are often referenced only by gyral patterning (Duvernoy, ; Fischl et al, ; Damasio, ; Mai et al, ; Naidich et al, ; Destrieux et al, ; Nowinski and Chua, ). To overcome these limitations, a 3‐dimensional (3D) model of an adult human brain based on whole‐brain serial sectioning, silver staining, and MRI (Amunts et al, ) was recently created, and a probabilistic cytoarchitectural atlas (JuBrain; see Caspers et al, ) is also being generated.…”

From chalkboard, slides, and paper to e‐learning: How computing technologies have transformed anatomical sciences education

“…The Human Brain Project was another large-scale U.S. federally funded structural database initiative directed at integrated neuroanatomical imaging and brain-mapping, and along with a number of other institutions, the University of Washington Digital Anatomist Project also participated in its various objective programs (Toga and Thompson, 2001;Brinkley and Rosse, 2002). Early products included interactive brain atlases (Brinkley and Rosse, 2002), and later work by Nowinski and colleagues (Nowinski, 2008;Nowinski et al, 1997Nowinski et al, , 2009Nowinski et al, , 2012aNowinski et al, , 2012bNowinski and Chua 2013;Nowinski et al, 2015) greatly advanced the objectives of functionally integrating imaging-based stereotaxic-precision atlases into clinically useful tools for neuroradiology and neurosurgery.…”

Comprehensive cellular‐resolution atlas of the adult human brain

“…A tremendous amount of effort has been dedicated to histology-based parcellation of discrete regions of the human brain, including the frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital, cingulate, and perirhinal cortices (Hof et al, 1995a;Van Essen et al, 2001;Vogt et al, 2001;€ Ong€ ur et al, 2003;Scheperjans et al, 2008;Zilles and Amunts, 2009;Ding et al, 2009;Goebel et al, 2012;Petrides and Pandya, 2012;Caspers et al, 2013b), and other regions such as the thalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, and brainstem (e.g., De Olmos, 2004;Garc ıa-Cabezas et al, 2007;Jones, 2007;Morel, 2007;Mai et al, 2008;Paxinos et al, 2012;Ding and Van Hoesen, 2015). Currently available large-scale histological reference atlases of the human brain vary substantially in their degree of brain coverage, information content, and structural annotation (Table 1), and much of the more recent work is absent in these atlases.…”