Title
Construction of a rat spinal cord atlas of axon morphometry.
Abstract
Atlases of the central nervous system are essential for understanding the pathophysiology of neurological diseases, which remains one of the greatest challenges in neuroscience research today. These atlases provide insight into the underlying white matter microstructure and have been created from a variety of animal models, including rats. Although existing atlases of the rat spinal cord provide some details of axon microstructure, there is currently no histological dataset that quantifies axon morphometry exhaustively in the entire spinal cord. In this study, we created the first comprehensive rat spinal cord atlas of the white matter microstructure with quantifiable axon and myelin morphometrics. Using full-slice scanning electron microscopy images and state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms, we generated an atlas of microstructural metrics such as axon diameter, axonal density and g-ratio. After registering the Watson spinal cord white matter atlas to our template, we computed statistics across metrics, spinal levels and tracts. We notably found that g-ratio is relatively constant, whereas axon diameter showed the greatest variation. The atlas, data and full analysis code are freely available at: https://github.com/neuropoly/atlas-rat.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116156
NeuroImage
Keywords
Field
DocType
Atlas,Microstructure,Histology,Spinal cord,White matter,Rat
Central nervous system,Spinal cord,Anatomy,White matter,Psychology,Cognitive psychology,Axon,Spinal cord white matter,Atlas (anatomy),Entire spinal cord,Myelin
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
202
1053-8119
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ariane Saliani110.68
Aldo Zaimi2121.33
Harris Nami310.68
Tanguy Duval4835.27
Nikola Stikov51047.79
Julien Cohen-Adad647229.21