Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Distribution and fibre field similarity mapping of the human anterior commissure fibres by diffusion tensor imaging

  • Research Article
  • Published:
Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Object

The anterior commissure is a critical interhemispheric pathway in animals, yet its connections in humans are not clearly understood. Its distribution has shown to vary greatly between species, and it is thought that in humans it may convey axons from a larger territory than previously thought. The aim was to use an anatomical mapping tool to look at the anterior commissure fibres and to compare the distribution findings with published anatomical understanding.

Materials and methods

Two different diffusion-weighted imaging data sets were acquired from eight healthy subjects using a 3 Tesla MR scanner with 32 gradient directions. Diffusion tensor imaging tractography was performed, and the anterior commissure fibres were selected using three-dimensional regions of interest. Distribution of the fibres was observed by means of registration with T2-weighted images. The fibre field similarity maps were produced for five of the eight subjects by comparing each subject’s fibres to the combined map of the five data sets.

Results

Fibres were shown to lead into the temporal lobe and towards the orbitofrontal cortex in the majority of subjects. Fibres were also distributed to the parietal or occipital lobes in all five subjects in whom the anterior commissure was large enough for interhemispheric fibres to be tracked through. The fibre field similarity maps highlighted areas where the local distances of fibre tracts were displayed for each subject compared to the combined bundle map.

Conclusion

The anterior commissure may play a more important role in interhemispheric communication than currently presumed by conveying axons from a wider territory, and the fibre field similarity maps give a novel approach to quantifying and visualising characteristics of fibre tracts.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Abbreviations

AC:

Anterior commissure

CC:

Corpus callosum

DTI:

Diffusion tensor imaging

DWI:

Diffusion-weighted imaging

STIR:

Short TI inversion recovery

References

  1. Spencer SS (1988) Corpus callosum section and other disconnection procedures for medically intractable epilepsy. Epilepsia 29(s2): S85–S99

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  2. Berlucchi G, Aglioti S, Marzi CA, Tassinari G (1995) Corpus callosum and simple visuomotor integration. Neuropsychologia 33(8): 923–936

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Risse GL, LeDoux J, Springer SP, Wilson DH, Gazzaniga MS (1978) The anterior commissure in man: functional variation in a multisensory system. Neuropsychologia 16(1): 23–31

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  4. Amacher AL (1976) Midline commissurotomy for the treatment of some cases of intractable epilepsy. Preliminary report. Childs Brain 2(1): 54–58

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  5. Foxman BT, Oppenheim J, Petito CK, Gazzaniga MS (1986) Proportional anterior commissure area in humans and monkeys. Neurology 36(11): 1513–1517

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. Fischer M, Ryan SB, Dobyns WB (1992) Mechanisms of interhemispheric transfer and patterns of cognitive function in acallosal patients of normal intelligence. Arch Neurol 49(3): 271–277

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  7. Bamiou DE, Sisodiya S, Musiek FE, Luxon LM (2007) The role of the interhemispheric pathway in hearing. Brain Res Rev 56(1): 170–182

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  8. Livy DJ, Schalomon PM, Roy M, Zacharias MC, Pimenta J, Lent R, Wahlsten D (1997) Increased axon number in the anterior commissure of mice lacking a corpus callosum. Exp Neurol 146(2): 491–501

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  9. Horel JA, Stelzner DJ (1981) Neocortical projections of the rat anterior commissure. Brain Res 220(1): 1–12

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  10. Pandya DN, Karol EA, Lele PP (1973) The distribution of the anterior commissure in the squirrel monkey. Brain Res 49(1): 177–180

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  11. Ehrlich D, Mills D (1985) Myelogenesis and estimation of the number of axons in the anterior commissure of the chick (Gallus gallus). Cell Tissue Res 239(3): 661–666

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  12. Glickstein M (2009) Paradoxical inter-hemispheric transfer after section of the cerebral commissures. Exp Brain Res 192(3): 425–429

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  13. Ashwell KW, Marotte LR, Li L, Waite PM (1996) Anterior commissure of the wallaby (Macropus eugenii): adult morphology and development. J Comp Neurol 366(3): 478–494

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  14. Di Virgilio G, Clarke S, Pizzolato G, Schaffner T (1999) Cortical regions contributing to the anterior commissure in man. Exp Brain Res 124(1): 1–7

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  15. Kiernan JA, Barr ML (1998) Barr’s the human nervous system: an anatomical viewpoint. Lippincott-Raven, New York

    Google Scholar 

  16. Fox CA, Fisher RR (1948) The distribution of the anterior commissure in the monkey, Macaca mulatta. J Comp Neurol 89(3): 245–277

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  17. Karol EA, Pandya DN (1971) The distribution of the corpus callosum in the Rhesus monkey. Brain 94(3): 471–486

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  18. Turner BH, Mishkin M, Knapp ME (1979) Distribution of the anterior commissure to the amygdaloid complex in the monkey. Brain Res 162(2): 331–337

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  19. Demeter S, Rosene DL, Van Hoesen GW (1990) Fields of origin and pathways of the interhemispheric commissures in the temporal lobe of macaques. J Comp Neurol 302(1): 29–53

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  20. Jacobson S, Marcus EM (2008) Neuroanatomy for the neuroscientist. Springer, New York

    Book  Google Scholar 

  21. Johnston JM, Vaishnavi SN, Smyth MD, Zhang D, He BJ, Zempel JM, Shimony JS, Snyder AZ, Raichle ME (2008) Loss of resting interhemispheric functional connectivity after complete section of the corpus callosum. J Neurosci 28(25): 6453–6458

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  22. Demeter S, Rosene DL, Van Hoesen GW (1985) Interhemispheric pathways of the hippocampal formation, presubiculum, and entorhinal and posterior parahippocampal cortices in the rhesus monkey: the structure and organization of the hippocampal commissures. J Comp Neurol 233(1): 30–47

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  23. Le Bihan D, Mangin JF, Poupon C, Clark CA, Pappata S, Molko N, Chabriat H (2001) Diffusion tensor imaging: concepts and applications. J Magn Reson Imaging 13(4): 534–546

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  24. Jellison BJ, Field AS, Medow J, Lazar M, Salamat MS, Alexander AL (2004) Diffusion tensor imaging of cerebral white matter: a pictorial review of physics, fiber tract anatomy, and tumor imaging patterns. AJNR Am J Neuroradiol 25(3): 356–369

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  25. Catani M, Ffytche DH (2005) The rises and falls of disconnection syndromes. Brain 128(Pt 10): 2224–2239

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  26. Catani M, Howard RJ, Pajevic S, Jones DK (2002) Virtual in vivo interactive dissection of white matter fasciculi in the human brain. Neuroimage 17(1): 77–94

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  27. Rockland KS, Pandya DN (1986) Topography of occipital lobe commissural connections in the rhesus monkey. Brain Res 365(1): 174–178

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  28. Toussaint N, Souplet JC, Fillard P (2007) Medinria: medical image navigation and research tool by INRIA. In: Proceedings of MICCAI’07 workshop on interaction in medical image analysis and visualization. Brisbane, Australia

  29. Fillard P, Gerig G (2003) Analysis tool for diffusion tensor MRI. In: Proceedings of MICCAI’03, ser. LNCS vol 2878(2), pp 967–968

  30. Xu D, Mori S, Solaiyappan M, van Zijl PCM, Davatzikos C (2002) A framework for callosal fiber distribution analysis. Neuroimage 17(3): 1131–1143

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  31. Weinstein D, Kindlmann G, Lundberg E (1999) Tensorlines: advection-diffusion based propagation through diffusion tensor fields. In: Proceedings of the conference on Visualization ‘99. San Francisco, California, United States

  32. Fitzpatrick J, West J (2001) The distribution of target registration error in rigid-body, point-based registration. IEEE Trans Med Imag 20(9): 917–927

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  33. Escott EJ, Rubinstein D (2003) Free DICOM image viewing and processing software for your desktop computer: what’s available and what it can do for you. Radiographics 23(5): 1341–1357

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  34. Glaunes J, Qiu A, Miller M, Younes L (2008) Large deformation diffeomorphic metric curve mapping. Int J Comput Vision 80(3): 317–336

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Durrleman S, Pennec X, Trouve A, Thompson P, Ayache N (2008) Inferring brain variability from diffeomorphic deformations of currents: an integrative approach. Med Image Anal 12(5): 626–637

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  36. Kimura D (1999) Sex and cognition. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  37. Mukherjee P, Chung SW, Berman JI, Hess CP, Henry RG (2008) Diffusion tensor MR imaging and fiber tractography: technical considerations. AJNR Am J Neuroradiol 29(5): 843–852

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  38. Jones DK, Basser PJ (2004) Squashing peanuts and smashing pumpkins: how noise distorts diffusion-weighted MR data. Magn Reson Med 52(5): 979–993

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  39. Mori S, Zhang J (2006) Principles of diffusion tensor imaging and its applications to basic neuroscience research. Neuron 51(5): 527–539

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  40. Meyer JR, Gutierrez A, Mock B, Hebron D, Prager JM, Gorey MT, Homer D (2000) High-b-value diffusion-weighted MR imaging of suspected brain infarction. AJNR Am J Neuroradiol 21(10): 1821–1829

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  41. Batchelor PG, Calamante F, Tournier J-D, Atkinson D, Hill DLG, Connelly A (2006) Quantification of the shape of fiber tracts. Magn Reson Med 55(4): 894–903

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  42. Catani M, Thiebaut de Schotten M (2008) A diffusion tensor imaging tractography atlas for virtual in vivo dissections. Cortex 44(8): 1105–1132

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  43. Gui M, Peng H, Carew JD, Lesniak MS, Arfanakis K (2008) A tractography comparison between turboprop and spin-echo echo-planar diffusion tensor imaging. Neuroimage 44(4): 1451–1462

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Freidlin RZ, Ozarslan E, Komlosh ME, Chang LC, Koay CG, Jones DK, Basser PJ (2007) Parsimonious model selection for tissue segmentation and classification applications: a study using simulated and experimental DTI data. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 26(11): 1576–1584

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  45. Dong Q, Welsh RC, Chenevert TL, Carlos RC, Maly-Sundgren P, Gomez-Hassan DM, Mukherji SK (2004) Clinical applications of diffusion tensor imaging. J Magn Reson Imaging 19(1): 6–1843

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  46. Alexander AL, Lee JE, Lazar M, Field AS (2007) Diffusion tensor imaging of the brain. Neurotherapeutics 4(3): 316–329

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Imaging Sciences, King’s College London, London, SE1 7EH, UK

    Markand Dipankumar Patel, Nicolas Toussaint, Geoffrey David Charles-Edwards & Philip G. Batchelor

  2. Medical Physics, Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK

    Geoffrey David Charles-Edwards

  3. Department of Paediatric Neurology, Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK

    Jean-Pierre Lin

Authors
  1. Markand Dipankumar Patel
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Nicolas Toussaint
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Geoffrey David Charles-Edwards
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Jean-Pierre Lin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Philip G. Batchelor
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Markand Dipankumar Patel.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Patel, M.D., Toussaint, N., Charles-Edwards, G.D. et al. Distribution and fibre field similarity mapping of the human anterior commissure fibres by diffusion tensor imaging. Magn Reson Mater Phy 23, 399–408 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10334-010-0201-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10334-010-0201-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation