EDEN2020 Ovine Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Tractography Atlas

This dataset has been created to share the first in vivo, population-averaged Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DTI) Ovine Tractography Atlas (OTA), where the course of the main white matter fiber bundles of the ovine brain has been reconstructed. The OTA has been described in the related paper ‘In vivo Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Tractography of the Sheep Brain: An Atlas of the Ovine White Matter Fiber Bundles’ by Pieri et al. (2019) https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2019.00345

In the context of the EU’s Horizon EDEN2020 project, in vivo brain MRI protocol for ovine animal models was optimized on a 1.5T scanner. High resolution conventional MRI scans and DTI sequences (b-value = 1,000 s/mm², 15 directions) were acquired on ten anesthetized sheep ovis aries, to define the diffusion features of normal adult ovine brain tissue. Topography of the ovine cortex was studied, and DTI maps were derived, to perform DTI deterministic tractography reconstruction of the corticospinal tract (CST), corpus callosum (CC), fornix (FX), visual pathway (VP), and occipitofrontal fascicle (OF), bilaterally for all the animals. Binary masks of the tracts were then coregistered and reported in the space of a standard stereotaxic ovine reference system ('ovine_model_05.nii', Nitzsche B. et al., Front. Neuroanat. 9:69. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnana.2015.00069). Finally, these were combined across animals to obtain population probability masks for each tract, representing voxel- by-voxel probability of the presence of the tract in the 10 animals, thus ranged between 0 and 10. 

Please don't forget to cite this publication when using the Ovine Tractography Atlas:                 

Pieri V., Trovatelli M., Cadioli M., Zani D.D., Brizzola S., Ravasio G., Acocella F., Di Giancamillo M., Malfassi L., Dolera M., Riva M., Bello L., Falini A., & Castellano A. (2019). In vivo Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Tractography of the Sheep Brain: An Atlas of the Ovine White Matter Fiber Bundles. Front Vet Sci, 6(345), 345 https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2019.00345    

This work has been carried out in the context of the EDEN2020 (Enhanced Delivery Ecosystem for Neurosurgery in 2020, www.eden2020.eu) project, that received funding from the European Union’s EU Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020 under Grant Agreement No. 688279.