The construction of a Chinese MRI brain atlas: a morphometric comparison study between Chinese and Caucasian cohorts

We developed a novel brain atlas template to facilitate computational brain studies of Chinese subjects and populations using high quality magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and well-validated image analysis techniques. To explore the ethnicity-based structural brain differences, we used the MRI scans of 35 Chinese male subjects (24.03+/-2.06 years) and compared them to an age-matched cohort of 35 Caucasian males (24.03+/-2.06 years). Global volumetric measures were used to identify significant group differences in the brain length, width, height and AC-PC line distance. Using the LONI BrainParser, 56 brain structures were automatically labeled and analyzed for all subjects. We identified significant ethnicity differences in brain structure volumes, suggesting that a population-specific brain atlas may be more appropriate for studies involving Chinese populations. To address this, we constructed a 3D Chinese brain atlas based on high resolution 3.0T MRI scans of 56 right-handed male Chinese volunteers (24.46+/-1.81 years). All Chinese brains were spatially normalized by using linear and nonlinear transformation via the "AIR Make Atlas" pipeline workflow within the LONI pipeline environment. This high-resolution Chinese brain atlas was compared to the ICBM152 template, which was constructed using Caucasian brains.