Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has proved to be an ideal modality for non-destructive and highly detailed assessment of structural morphology in biological tissues. Here we used MRI to make a dataset of ex vivo brains from two different rodent models of Huntington’s disease (HD), the R6/2 line and the YAC 128 mouse. We are making the whole dataset (399 transgenic HD and wildtype (WT) brains, from mice aged 9-80 weeks) publicly available. These data will be useful, not only to investigators interested in in the study of HD, but also to researchers of computational neuroanatomy who may not have access to such large datasets from mouse models. Here we demonstrate a number of uses of such data, for example to produce maps of grey and white matter and cortical thickness. As an example of how the library might provide insights in mouse models of HD, we calculated whole brain grey matter volumes across different age groups with different CAG repeat lengths. (The R6/2 dataset was obtained from an allelic series of R6/2 mice carrying a range of CAG repeat lengths between 109 and 464.)

This analysis revealed different trajectories for each fragment length. In particular there was a gradient of decreasing pathology with longer CAG repeat lengths, reflecting our previous findings with behavioural and histological findings. There will be no constraints on the use of the datasets included here.

The database also includes sheep models from the OVT73 transgenic sheep line.

Click here for the index of mouse images

Click here for SPMMouse

Image details

Ex-skull and in-skull mouse data are acquired at 70µm isotropic resolution, sheep in-vivo data are at 800µm isotropic resolution with DTI at 2mm isotropic resolution with 64 directions at b=1000s/mm² and one b=0s/mm² image.

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