Magnetic resonance imaging and micro-computed tomography combined atlas of developing and adult mouse brains for stereotaxic surgery

Abstract

Stereotaxic atlases of the mouse brain are important in neuroscience research for targeting of specific internal brain structures during surgical operations. The effectiveness of stereotaxic surgery depends on accurate mapping of the brain structures relative to landmarks on the skull. During postnatal development in the mouse, rapid growth-related changes in the brain occur concurrently with growth of bony plates at the cranial sutures, therefore adult mouse brain atlases cannot be used to precisely guide stereotaxis in developing brains. In this study, three-dimensional stereotaxic atlases of C57BL/ 6J mouse brains at six postnatal developmental stages: P7, P14, P21, P28, P63 and in adults (P140-P160) were developed, using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and micro-computed tomography (CT). At present, most widely-used stereotaxic atlases of the mouse brain are based on histology, but the anatomical fidelity of ex vivo atlases to in vivo mouse brains has not been evaluated previously. To account for ex vivo tissue distortion due to fixation as well as individual variability in the brain, we developed a population-averaged in vivo MRI adult mouse brain stereotaxic atlas, and a distortioncorrected DTI atlas was generated by nonlinearly warping ex vivo data to the population-averaged in vivo atlas. These atlas resources were developed and made available through a new software userinterface with the objective of improving the accuracy of targeting brain structures during stereotaxic surgery in developing and adult C57BL/6J mouse brains. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptNeuroscience. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 September 15. Published in final edited form as:Neuroscience. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptAtlases of the mouse brain are fundamentally important in various types of neuroscience studies, including identification of specific brain regions, guidance of stereotaxic operations, and registration of information such as gene expression locations. In the past, histology-based atlases of rodent brains have been widely used for these purposes (Sidman et al., 1971;Pellegrino et al., 1979;Paxinos and Watson, 1982;Kaufman, 1992;Kruger et al., 1995;Franklin and Paxinos, 1997; Jacobowitz and Abbott, 1997;Hof et al., 2000;Baldock et al., 2001;Valverde, 2004;Paxinos et al., 2007;Dong, 2008;Schambra, 2008). Among these applications of the atlases, stereotaxic surgical operations such as injection of chemical substances, implantation of electrodes, site-targeted cell delive...

Behavioral and Neuroanatomical Phenotypes in Mouse Models of Autism

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“…Aggarwal et al [16] developed in vivo MRI adult mouse brain stereotaxic atlas, and a distortion-corrected DTI atlas was generated by non-linearly warping ex vivo CT data. Therefore, our method has potential to increase the accuracy of structural co-ordinates for tissue distortion caused by MRI scanning and fixation, and to use non-distortion 3D rodent atlas as in the previous report [16]. Another advantage of this approach is that micro-CT scanners are much cheaper than high-field MRI equipment and systems, and are much cheaper to site and maintain.…”