Segmentation of anatomo-functional 3D post mortem data using a MRI-based 3D digital atlas: Transgenic mouse brains study

Many analyses in neurosciences are carried out on histological and autoradiographic datasets and performed by manually drawing regions of interest on these 2D post mortem data. Such task being time-consuming, we propose an automated segmentation strategy to analyze 3D post mortem brain images. This method is based on the co-registration of a MRI-based 3D digital atlas on 3D-reconstructed post mortem data. We first deformed the original MRI on post mortem volumes. We then applied deformation parameters to warp the digital atlas. The method was tested on APP/PS1 mouse models of Alzheimer´s disease and PS1 control littermates. Its reliability was qualitatively evaluated and a quantitative assessment was performed by comparing atlas and manual segmentations. Our results show this approach is promising to investigate at organ scale post mortem mouse datasets faster and in a more robust manner than with classical methods.