Fiber Tract Tracing Of White Matter Based On Neurite-resolution Mouse Brain Dataset

The study of white matter fiber tract of mouse brain provides a solid support touncover the principle on how the mouse brain transmits and processes information. Thetraditional atlas of mouse can give two-dimensional information, showing the subdivision,functional nuclei and white matter fiber tract of mouse. The intuitive three-dimensionalfiber tract of white matter could not be achieved by referring to the atlas of mouse. Inaddition, the axial resolution of mouse atlas is relatively low. The newly developingdiffusion tensor imaging (DTI) based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can imagethe white matter fiber tract of mouse noninvasively and trace their three-dimensionalprojection pathways automatically. Recently this technique has been widely used to thestudy of connectome and pathologic model of mouse. The DTI image is not able toanalyze single fiber in fiber tract since the resolution of neurite is on the level of micronwhile the DTI can only provide about one hundred microns. So it is extremely importantto construct three-dimensional white matter fiber tract of mouse based on new opticalimaging technique with high resolution.This dissertation studies image preprocessing and three-dimensional visualizationmethods based on neurite-resolution mouse brain dataset acquired using Micro-OpticalSectioning Tomography, and traces the white matter fiber tract of Golgi-stained andThy1-eYFP+mouse brain respectively, and finally obtains the high-resolutionthree-dimensional anatomic structure of white matter fiber tract. The image preprocessingmethod can weaken image noise such as bright background region and enhance thecontrast of image, greatly improving the image quality of these two datasets mentionedabove. The three-dimensional visualization can help to quickly locate the fiber tract inmouse brain which is pretty useful for tracing of fiber tract. The volume data fromGolgi-stained mouse brain dataset is firstly traced based on three-dimensional vectorization, then clustered with K-means method. As to Thy1-eYPF+mouse braindataset, the pyramidal tract, a long-way projection pathway, is traced manually.This dissertation traces fiber tract based on Golgi-stained and Thy1-eYFP+mousedataset respectively, obtaining the pathway of single fiber and long-way fiber tractprojection across brain regions. Comparing to traditional mouse stereotic atlas, thisdissertation gives three dimensional projection pathway of white matter fiber tract. At thesame time, this dissertation provides projection pathway of single fiber, whose resolutionis higher than DTI technique. This dissertation is fundamental to analyze anatomy ofhigh-resolution fiber tract, and also important to explore the transmitting and processingmechanisms of neuronal signals and the pathological model of neuronal diseases.