Identifying the midline thalamus in humans in vivo

AbstractThe midline thalamus is critical for flexible cognition, memory, and stress regulation in humans and its dysfunction is associated with several neurological and psychiatric disorders, including Alzheimer ’s disease, schizophrenia, and depression. Despite the pervasive role of the midline thalamus in cognition and disease, there is a limited understanding of its function in humans, likely due to the absence of a rigorous noninvasive neuroimaging methodology to identify its location. Here, we introd uce a new method for identifying the midline thalamus in vivo using probabilistic tractography andk-means clustering with diffusion weighted imaging data. This approach clusters thalamic voxels based on data-driven cortical and subcortical connectivity profiles and then segments the midline thalamus according to anatomical connectivity tracer studies in rodents and macaques. Results from two different diffusion weighted imaging sets, including adult data (22 –35 years) from the Human Connectome Project (n = 127) and adolescent data (9–14 years) collected at Florida International University (n = 34) showed that this approach reliably classifies midline thalamic clusters. As expected, these clusters were most evident along the dorsal/ventral extent of the third ventricle and were primarily connected to the agranular medial prefrontal cortex (e.g., anterior cingulate cortex), nucleus a ccumbens, and medial temporal lobe regions. The midline thalamus was then bis...

Source: Anatomy and Embryology - January 4, 2023 Category: Anatomy Source Type: research