An Atlas for Human Brain Myelin Content Throughout the Adult Life Span

Overview

Journal Sci Rep

Specialty Science

Date 2021 Jan 12

PMID 33431990

Citations 31

Authors

Adam V Dvorak

Taylor Swift-LaPointe

Irene M Vavasour

Lisa Eunyoung Lee

Shawna Abel

Bretta Russell-Schulz

Carina Graf

Anika Wurl

Hanwen Liu

Cornelia Laule

David K B Li

Anthony Traboulsee

Roger Tam

Lara A Boyd

Alex L MacKay

Shannon H Kolind

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Myelin water imaging is a quantitative neuroimaging technique that provides the myelin water fraction (MWF), a metric highly specific to myelin content, and the intra-/extra-cellular T (IET2), which is related to water and iron content. We coupled high-resolution data from 100 adults with gold-standard methodology to create an optimized anatomical brain template and accompanying MWF and IET2 atlases. We then used the MWF atlas to characterize how myelin content relates to demographic factors. In most brain regions, myelin content followed a quadratic pattern of increase during the third decade of life, plateau at a maximum around the fifth decade, then decrease during later decades. The ranking of mean myelin content between brain regions remained consistent across age groups. These openly available normative atlases can facilitate evaluation of myelin imaging results on an individual basis and elucidate the distribution of myelin content between brain regions and in the context of aging.

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