In-Vivo Mapping of the Human Locus Coeruleus
By Noam I. Keren, Carl Lozar, Kelly C. Harris, Paul Simon Morgan, Mark A. Eckert. NeuroImage, 2009
306 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The locus coeruleus (LC) is a brainstem structure that has widespread cortical and sub-cortical projections to modulate states of attention. Our understanding of the LC’s role in both normal attention and clinical populations affected by disrupted attention would be advanced by having in vivo functional and structural markers of the human LC. Evidence for LC activation can be difficult to interpret because of uncertainty about whether brainstem activity can be accurately localized to the LC. High resolution T1-turbo spin echo (T1-TSE) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) (in plane resolution of 0.4 mm × 0.4 mm) was used in this study to characterize the location and distribution probability of the LC across 44 adults ranging in age from 19–79 years. Utilizing a study-specific brainstem template, the individual brainstems were aligned into standard space, while preserving variations in LC signal intensity. Elevated T1-TSE signal was observed in the rostral pons that was strongly correlated with the position and concentration of LC cells previously reported in a study of post-mortem brains (r = .90). The elevated T1-TSE signal was used to produce a probabilistic map of the LC in standard Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) coordinate space. This map can be used to test hypotheses about the LC in human structural and functional imaging studies. Such efforts will contribute to our understanding of attention systems in normal and clinical populations.
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/79d9660e630b1d5b15edbb9a4afee42a2b35eda5
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
In Cognitive Neuroscience
In Neurology
Citations in the corpus
- Pupil diameter covaries with BOLD activity in human locus coeruleus (2014, methodology): “In a series of volume of interest (VOI) analyses, the region of overlap between the LC atlas [Keren et al., 2009] and the dorsal pontine cluster that correlated with pupil diameter during task performance exhibited a greater evoked response to target stimuli than to standards.”