Multiarchitectonic and stereotactic atlas of the human thalamus

Abstract

To improve anatomical definition and stereotactic precision of thalamic targets in neurosurgical treatments of chronic functional disorders, a new atlas of the human thalamus has been developed. This atlas is based on multiarchitectonic parcellation in sections parallel or perpendicular to the standard intercommissural reference plane. The calcium-binding proteins parvalbumin (PV), calbindin D-28K (CB), and calretinin (CR) were used as neurochemical markers to further characterize thalamic nuclei and delimit subterritories of functional significance for stereotactic explorations. Their overall distribution reveals a subcompartmentalization of thalamic nuclei into several groups. Predominant PV immunostaining characterizes primary somatosensory, visual and auditory nuclei, the ventral lateral posterior nucleus, reticular nucleus (R), and to a lesser degree also, lateral part of the centre median nucleus, and anterior, lateral, and inferior divisions of the pulvinar complex. In contrast, CB immunoreactivity is prevalent in medial thalamic nuclei (intralaminar and midline), the posterior complex, ventral posterior inferior nucleus, the ventral lateral anterior nucleus, ventral anterior, and ventral medial nuclei. The complementary distributions of PV and CB appear to correlate with distinct lemniscal and spinothalamic somatosensory pathways and to cerebellar and pallidal motor territories, respectively. Calretinin, while overlapping with CB in medial thalamic territories, is also expressed in R and limbic associated anterior group nuclei that contain little or no CB. Preliminary analysis indicates that interindividual nuclear variations cannot easily be taken into account by standardization procedures. Nevertheless, some corrections in antero-posterior coordinates in relation to different intercommissural distances are proposed.

A three-dimensional, histological and deformable atlas of the human basal ganglia. I. Atlas construction based on immunohistochemical and MRI data

“…Because the scale of these targets is below the spatial and/or contrast resolution of clinical practice MRI, atlas-based methods are the only way to identify all the basal ganglia nuclei. The best known atlases of the human brain comprise the hemispheres (Mai et al, 1997;Schaltenbrand and Bailey, 1959;Schaltenbrand and Wahren, 1977;Talairach et al, 1957;Talairach and Tournoux, 1988), or the brain stem and cerebellum (Afshar et al, 1978), or the thalamus (Andrew and Watkins, 1969;Morel et al, 1997;Van Buren and Borke, 1972). Some present both histology (cyto-and/ or myelo-architectony) and contour tracing (Mai et al, 1997;Morel et al, 1997;Schaltenbrand and Wahren, 1977) while others propose only contour drawings (Talairach and Tournoux, 1988) or MRI with photographs of brain sections (Duvernoy, 2004).…”

“…Histological atlases are most commonly employed in printed form (Mai et al, 1997;Morel et al, 1997;Schaltenbrand and Wahren, 1977) and, therefore, have to be compared and reconciled mentally with the MRI of each individual patient by the atlas user. Previously, one of the authors developed a method in which a digitized version of an atlas (Schaltenbrand and Wahren, 1977) is linearly and interactively coregistered with the patient MRI (Yelnik et al, , 2003, a technique similar to that applied to an atlas of the thalamus (Morel et al, 1997;Niemann et al, 2000). However, these atlases have two important limitations: they have a low 3D coherency and they do not include functional information.…”

Optimized high‐resolution mapping of magnetization transfer (MT) at 3 Tesla for direct visualization of substructures of the human thalamus in clinically feasible measurement time

“…This angulation is commonly used in stereotaxy, and also by Hirai and Jones (3) and Morel et al (18). In this study, we adhere to the parcellation and nomenclature of Hirai and Jones (3).…”

Neural correlates of a ‘pessimistic’ attitude when anticipating events of unknown emotional valence

“…Their results were not in conflict with the reported results. The identification of the anatomical regions was based on the Talairach and Tournoux system (Talairach and Tournoux, 1988), for the thalamus additionally considering a more detailed thalamus specific stereotaxic atlas (Morel et al, 1997) and a report of MRI visualization of the thalamus (Deoni et al, 2005).…”

“…The medial thalamic region that was associated with negative and unknown expectation comprised areas within the ventromedial, dorsomedial, and centromedial thalamus (Talairach and Tournoux, 1988;Morel et al, 1997;Deoni et al, 2005). Medial thalamic regions receive input from viscerosensitive and pain mediating brainstem areas such as the parabrachial nucleus, the subnucleus reticularis, and the periaqueductal gray (Vogt, 2005;Craig, 2002).…”