NeuroMorphoNaut

Accurate anatomical localization is essential in fMRI.  Human brain atlases are evolving from a 2D, physical, single-brain set of pictures and drawings (a book), through a CDROM of pdf files, into software that: has stereotaxic coordinates, contains multiple brains, explicitly represents regions, is searchable and has interactive processing and visualization capabilities. “NeuroMorphoNaut” (NMN) is a platform for neuroanatomical analysis that is based on a database of a large number of manually labeled MRI brain scans.  We present initial results from an ongoing project to comprehensively label on the order of 1000 scans.  In the context of the user’s individual scan, NMN provides neuroanatomical information using a probabilistic atlas that was created from the manually labeled scans. The user can view and interact with this information along with information from traditional atlases.  Scans were labeled using a protocol that precisely defines the landmarks, borders and methods for delineating more than 150 regions covering the entire brain.  So far, 40 structural scans have been labeled (20 subjects scanned at two different times).  The probabilistic atlas was created from these scans and is used to understand the anatomy of an individual scan by warping the atlas into the native space of that scan.  The atlas displays a list of ROIs in order of their probability for any point in the scan.  NeuroMorphoNaut is a dynamic interactive probabilistic brain atlas that will enable a deep understanding of normal structure and its variation and will help address the localization problem in functional neuroimaging.