The PSP subcortical atlas - a new neuroimaging atlas for progressive supranuclear palsy Richardson's syndrome.

OBJECTIVES

The severe cerebral atrophy patterns of progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) create challenges in clinical neuroradiology practice and neuroimaging research as often, subcortical regions are not accurately segmented with existing atlases or require labour intense manual segmentation. We aimed to create a PSP specific neuroimaging atlas.

METHODS

Seven subcortical regions were manually segmented on Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) images of 33 PSP Richardson's Syndrome (PSP-RS) subjects and used to automatically segment 10 validation subjects using the ANTs Joint Label Fusion module. Accuracy was confirmed by determining the Dice coefficient (DC) and 95% Hausdorff Distance (HD95) using manual segmentation of QSM images of as the gold standard in a leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV).

RESULTS

The PSP atlas outperformed existing atlases with mean DC and HD95 of 0.90 ± 0.20 and 0.86 mm ± 0.17 compared to 0.73 ± 0.04 and 2.69 mm ± 0.75 for Talaraich and Harvard-Oxford atlases.

CONCLUSIONS

Our new PSP subcortical atlas outperforms currently available atlases and can be applied to multimodal datasets and T1-weighted images alone.