Stereotaxic Display of Brain Lesions

TLDR

Lesion localization has traditionally relied on templates, text descriptions, or raw slices, which are limited; presenting MRI scans in a common stereotaxic space aligns with standard atlases and allows direct comparison of lesion position and volume across patients. The authors present freely available software that displays patient scans in a common stereotaxic space and recommend this approach as the new standard for neuropsychological studies. The software aligns MRI scans to a standard stereotaxic space and can also be applied to CT, PET, and SPECT images.

Abstract

Traditionally lesion location has been reported using standard templates, text based descriptions or representative raw slices from the patient′s CT or MRI scan. Each of these methods has drawbacks for the display of neuroanatomical data. One solution is to display MRI scans in the same stereotaxic space popular with researchers working in functional neuroimaging. Presenting brains in this format is useful as the slices correspond to the standard anatomical atlases used by neuroimagers. In addition, lesion position and volume are directly comparable across patients. This article describes freely available software for presenting stereotaxically aligned patient scans. This article focuses on MRI scans, but many of these tools are also applicable to other modalities (e.g. CT, PET and SPECT). We suggest that this technique of presenting lesions in terms of images normalized to standard stereotaxic space should become the standard for neuropsychological studies.