Large-scale UK Biobank Whole Body Atlases

Population atlases are commonly utilised in medical imaging to facilitate the investigation of variability across populations. 
Such atlases enable the mapping of medical images into a common coordinate system, promoting comparability and enabling the study of inter-subject differences. 
Constructing such atlases becomes particularly challenging when working with highly heterogeneous datasets, such as whole-body images, where subjects show significant anatomical variations.
In this work, we propose a pipeline for generating a standardised whole-body atlas for a highly heterogeneous population by partitioning the population into anatomically meaningful subgroups. 
Using magnetic resonance (MR) images from the UK Biobank dataset, we create six whole-body atlases representing a healthy population average. 
We furthermore unbias them, and this way obtain a realistic representation of the population.
In addition to the anatomical atlases, we generate probabilistic atlases that capture the distributions of abdominal fat (visceral and subcutaneous) and five abdominal organs across the population (liver, spleen, pancreas, left and right kidneys).
We demonstrate a clinical application of these atlases, using the differences between subjects with medical conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases and healthy subjects from the atlas space.
With this work, we make the constructed anatomical and label atlases publically available and anticipate them to support medical research conducted on whole-body MR images.