Abstract #0306

Construction of a quantifiable rat spinal cord atlas and tract delineation using agglomerative clustering

Harris Nami¹, Ariane Saliani^1,2, Aldo Zaimi¹, Tanguy Duval^1,3, Christian Perone¹, Nikola Stikov^1,4, and Julien Cohen-Adad^1,5

¹NeuroPoly Lab, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada, ²Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada, ³UMR 1214 Toulouse Neuroimaging Center, Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale, Toulouse, France, ⁴Montreal Heart Institute, Montreal, QC, Canada, ⁵Functional Neuroimaging Unit, CRIUGM, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada

With qMRI becoming the norm in obtaining quantitative values for most MRI studies, there is still a need for its validation as new techniques are constantly being implemented. With this in mind, we propose a matter microstructure atlas of the rat spinal cord based on high-resolution histology. This atlas contains morphometric data such as axon density, axon diameter and g-ratio. Furthermore, a clustering algorithm was implemented to generate white matter tracts delineation based on axon morphometry, possibly leading to an improvement on outdated atlases. The proposed atlas is open access and can be used for quantitative comparisons with qMRI studies.

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