Chimpanzee Brain Morphometry Utilizing Standardized MRI Preprocessing and Macroanatomical Annotations

Published: March 29, 2021, 1:03 a.m.

Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.04.20.046680v1?rss=1 Authors: Vickery, S., Hopkins, W. D., Sherwood, C. C., Schapiro, S. J., Latzman, R. D., Caspers, S., Gaser, C., Eickhoff, S. B., Dahnke, R., Hoffstaedter, F. Abstract: Chimpanzees are among the closest living relatives to humans and, therefore, provide a crucial comparative model for investigating primate brain evolution. In recent years, human brain research has strongly benefited from enhanced computational models and image processing pipelines that could also improve data analyses in animals by using species-specific templates. In this study, we use MRI data from the National Chimpanzee Brain Resource (NCBR) to develop the chimpanzee brain template Juna.Chimp for spatial registration and the novel macro-anatomical brain parcellation Davi130 for standardized whole-brain analysis. Additionally, we introduce a ready-to-use complete image processing pipeline built upon the CAT12 toolbox in SPM12, implementing a standard human image preprocessing framework in chimpanzees. Applying this approach to data from 178 subjects, we find strong evidence for age-related GM atrophy in multiple regions of the chimpanzee brain, as well as, a human-like anterior-posterior pattern of hemispheric asymmetry in medial chimpanzee brain regions. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info