Developing and validating an elderly brain template: A comprehensive comparison with MNI152 for age-specific...

Area of Science:

• Neuroimaging
• Brain Anatomy
• Geriatric Medicine

Background:

• The standard Montreal Neurological Institute 152 (MNI152) brain template is based on young adults.
• This template may not accurately represent age-related brain morphology changes.
• An "Elderly" template was developed to address this limitation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a new brain template optimized for older adults.
• To compare the spatial normalization accuracy of the Elderly template against the MNI152 template.
• To assess the template's performance across different brain tissues and subcortical regions.

Main Methods:

• Constructed the Elderly template using MRI scans from 90 OASIS-1 participants matching Japanese census demographics.
• Compared spatial normalization accuracy with the MNI152 template using the IXI dataset.
• Analyzed 282 scans (ages 20-80+) from UK Biobank, assessing whole-brain similarity (CC, MSE, 3D-SSIM) and regional Dice coefficients (WM, GM, CSF, subcortical regions).

Main Results:

• Significant Age × Template interactions were found for cross-correlation and mean-squared error (p < 0.001).
• Cerebrospinal fluid showed notable differences in individuals aged 60 and older.
• The Elderly template demonstrated the greatest improvement in subcortical regions like the caudate, thalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala.

Conclusions:

• The Elderly template provides more accurate spatial normalization for older adults compared to the MNI152 template.
• This improved accuracy facilitates more precise age-specific neuroimaging analyses.
• The Elderly template holds potential for advancing neurodegenerative disease research and clinical applications.