Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 19, 2025
Author Spotlight: Bridging Gaps in Anatomy and Establishing a Foundation for Algorithmic Studies
Published on: December 15, 2023
Deep Learning Segmentation of the Nucleus Basalis of Meynert on 3T MRI
D J Doss1,2,3, G W Johnson4,2,3, S Narasimhan4,2,3,5
1From the Department of Biomedical Engineering (D.J.D., G.W.J., S.N., H.F.J.G., C. Chang., V.L.M., C. Constantinidis, D.J.E.), Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee derekjdoss@gmail.com.
Background And Purpose:
The nucleus basalis of Meynert is a key subcortical structure that is important in arousal and cognition and has been explored as a deep brain stimulation target but is difficult to study due to its small size, variability among patients, and lack of contrast on 3T MR imaging. Thus, our goal was to establish and evaluate a deep learning network for automatic, accurate, and patient-specific segmentations with 3T MR imaging.
Materials And Methods:
Patient-specific segmentations can be produced manually; however, the nucleus basalis of Meynert is difficult to accurately segment on 3T MR imaging, with 7T being preferred. Thus, paired 3T and 7T MR imaging data sets of 21 healthy subjects were obtained. A test data set of 6 subjects was completely withheld. The nucleus was expertly segmented on 7T, providing accurate labels for the paired 3T MR imaging. An external data set of 14 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy was used to test the model on brains with neurologic disorders. A 3D-Unet convolutional neural network was constructed, and a 5-fold cross-validation was performed.
Results:
The novel segmentation model demonstrated significantly improved Dice coefficients over the standard probabilistic atlas for both healthy subjects (mean, 0.68 [SD, 0.10] versus 0.45 [SD, 0.11], P = .002, t test) and patients (0.64 [SD, 0.10] versus 0.37 [SD, 0.22], P < .001). Additionally, the model demonstrated significantly decreased centroid distance in patients (1.18 [SD, 0.43] mm, 3.09 [SD, 2.56] mm, P = .007).
Conclusions:
We developed the first model, to our knowledge, for automatic and accurate patient-specific segmentation of the nucleus basalis of Meynert. This model may enable further study into the nucleus, impacting new treatments such as deep brain stimulation.
