# Ultra-high Resolution Structural Connectome Atlases of the Animal Brain and their Associated Toolbox

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH AT PITTSBURGH · 2022 · $597,844

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
A structural connectome can provide critical information for animal brain studies to study white matter bundles
and correlate brain circuits with experimental findings. As more animal models for neurological disorders are
widely used to understand the disease mechanism and test possible treatments, tractography atlases will help
those studies to correlate white matter pathways with brain function or dysfunction. Here, we aim to construct
tractography atlases at unprecedented details as structural connectome for mouse, rat, and rhesus macaque
and developed associated toolboxes for novel tractography analytics. To achieve this goal, we have formed a
multidisciplinary team between Duke Center for In Vivo Microscopy and the "DSI Studio" team at the University
of Pittsburgh. At Duke CIVM, we will acquire the ultra-high resolution "beyond-tensor" diffusion MRI on the
mouse, rat, and rhesus macaque brains to resolve complicated axonal structures. The image acquisition will be
accelerated using compressed sensing and further reconstructed using a super-resolution approach. Besides
MRI, the rat and mouse brain tissue will be processed by tissue clearing and scanned by light-sheet
fluorescence microscopy to capture cell-level histology details of the entire brain. The diffusion MRI data will
then be processed at the University of Pittsburgh to construct tractography atlases and develop novel
automated tractography, shape analysis, and bundle analytics toolboxes. We will track whole-brain pathways
and cluster them into bundles. Our neuroanatomist team will validate tractography against publicly available
tracer data and aggregate the results in tractography atlases, which will be used to build their associated atlas-
based automated tractography and associated analysis. The completion of this study will provide a mesoscale
structural connectome with integrated histologic images at unprecedented quality as well as their associated
toolboxes. The data and tools combined will serve as invaluable resources for animal studies to investigate
brain disorders.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10364874
- **Project number:** 1R01NS120954-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH AT PITTSBURGH
- **Principal Investigator:** FANG-CHENG YEH
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $597,844
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2022-02-15 → 2026-12-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10364874

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10364874, Ultra-high Resolution Structural Connectome Atlases of the Animal Brain and their Associated Toolbox (1R01NS120954-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10364874. Licensed CC0.

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