Defining the Intercommissural Plane and Stereotactic Coordinates for the Basal Ganglia in the Göttingen Minipig Brain

Abstract

The intercommissural line joining the anterior and posterior commissures defines stereotactic coordinate systems used in functional neurosurgical procedures. Such coordinate systems are generally accepted in humans and nonhuman primate experimental settings and provide high stereotactic precision and reproducibility. The ethical concern surrounding the use of nonhuman primates has motivated and helped popularize the use of the Göttingen minipig as an alternative experimental model for experimental functional neurosurgery. We investigated the position and variability of the intercommissural line in the minipig brain using in vivo MRI. From these data, standard coordinates for the minipig basal ganglia were estimated. We found the variability of the intercommissural line to be small in the Göttingen minipig and the variability of the basal ganglia structures to the mid-commissural point to be minor.

MRI Brain Templates of the Male Yucatan Minipig

“…and T N L58 exceed this level beyond the 70% probability threshold. We note also that the objective here was to produce templates for neuroimaging processing pipelines for functional and structural analyses, and we have not considered their utility for surgical planning, although subcortical contrast is also a major factor for surgical planning in experimental procedures (Rosendal et al, 2010).…”

“…The Yucatan has also been used to develop a reliable brain tumor model for glioblastoma (Khoshnevis et al, 2017) and recent studies have utilized MRI to investigate head and neck vasculature, mechanical properties related to TBI, and stroke (Guertler et al, 2018;Habib et al, 2013;Platt et al, 2014). As a topic related to templates, it should be noted that for neurosurgical procedures, stereotaxic coordinates in the form of topological atlases for pigs have been available for decades (Lind et al, 2007;Yoshikawa, 1968;Salinas-Zeballos et al, 1986;Félix et al, 1999) and stereotaxic methodology continues to be an area of research and development (Bjarkam et al, 2009;Rosendal et al, 2010;Glud et al, 2017). Indeed, for the Yucatan, the study most closely related to this report comes from a stereotaxic comparative study between 6 animals imaged at 1.5 T and compared to their axially sectioned histology (Yun et al, 2011).…”