Thalamic nuclei in motor neuron disease: volumetric profiles
Description
Thalamic degeneration is a recognised feature of motor neuron disease which manifest in a range of extrapyramidal motor and neuropsychological deficits. While computational neuroimaging allows the detailed characterisation of thalamic changes in vivo, existing neuroimaging studies have invariably evaluated the thalamus as a single structure. In this dataset we present the volumetric profile of specific thalamic nuclei in 100 patients with ALS, 33 patients with PLS and 117 healthy controls. T1-weighted images were acquired with a 3D Inversion Recovery prepared Spoiled Gradient Recalled echo pulse sequence with an isometric spatial resolution of 1 mm3 on a 3 Tesla MRI system. A Bayesian inference was used to segment the thalamus into specific nuclei using a probabilistic atlas. The study was sponsored by the Spastic Paraplegia Foundation, Inc. (SPF), the Health Research Board (HRB EIA-2017-019), the EU Joint Programme – Neurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND), the Andrew Lydon scholarship, the Irish Institute of Clinical Neuroscience (IICN), the Iris O'Brien Foundation. Methodological details are provided in: "Switchboard" malfunction in motor neuron diseases: Selective pathology of thalamic nuclei in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and primary lateral sclerosis. Chipika RH, Finegan E, Li Hi Shing S, McKenna MC, Christidi F, Chang KM, Doherty MA, Hengeveld JC, Vajda A, Pender N, Hutchinson S, Donaghy C, McLaughlin RL, Hardiman O, Bede P. Neuroimage Clin. 2020 May 30;27:102300. doi: 10.1016/j.nicl.2020.102300. Online ahead of print. PMID: 32554322