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A Deformable Atlas of the Laboratory Mouse

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Abstract

Purpose

This paper presents a deformable mouse atlas of the laboratory mouse anatomy. This atlas is fully articulated and can be positioned into arbitrary body poses. The atlas can also adapt body weight by changing body length and fat amount.

Procedures

A training set of 103 micro-CT images was used to construct the atlas. A cage-based deformation method was applied to realize the articulated pose change. The weight-related body deformation was learned from the training set using a linear regression method. A conditional Gaussian model and thin-plate spline mapping were used to deform the internal organs following the changes of pose and weight.

Results

The atlas was deformed into different body poses and weights, and the deformation results were more realistic compared to the results achieved with other mouse atlases. The organ weights of this atlas matched well with the measurements of real mouse organ weights. This atlas can also be converted into voxelized images with labeled organs, pseudo CT images and tetrahedral mesh for phantom studies.

Conclusions

With the unique ability of articulated pose and weight changes, the deformable laboratory mouse atlas can become a valuable tool for preclinical image analysis.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr. Richard M. Leahy and Dr. Boudewijn P.F. Lelieveldt for providing the online resources of the Digimouse atlas and the articulated mouse skeleton atlas and Dr. Qianqian Fang and Dr. Bing Jian for publishing the software of iso2mesh and point set registration. We thank Dr. Anna Wu, Owen Witte, Tove Olafsen, Melissa Mccracken, Richard Tavare, Scott Knowles, Waldemar Ladno, and Darin Williams from UCLA for sharing the mouse organ weight dissection data and Dr. John David, D.V.M. for the professional comments on mouse anatomy. We also appreciate the efforts of the anonymous reviewers who helped us to improve the paper quality. This work was supported in part by SAIRP NIHNCI 2U24 CA092865 and a UCLA Chancellor’s Bioscience Core grant.

Conflict of Interest

This deformable mouse atlas contains copyrightable subject matter that has been assigned to the Regents of the University of California (UC case 2014-894).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Crump Institute of Molecular Imaging, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA, Los Angeles, USA

    Hongkai Wang, David B. Stout & Arion F. Chatziioannou

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  1. Hongkai Wang
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Correspondence to Hongkai Wang.

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Wang, H., Stout, D.B. & Chatziioannou, A.F. A Deformable Atlas of the Laboratory Mouse. Mol Imaging Biol 17, 18–28 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11307-014-0767-7

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