Toward a Common Terminology for the Thalamus

The wealth of competing parcellations with limited cross-correspondence between atlases of the human thalamus raises problems in a time when the usefulness of neuroanatomical methods is increasingly appreciated for modern computational analyses of the brain. An unequivocal nomenclature is, however, compulsory for the understanding of the organization of the thalamus. This situation cannot be improved by renewed discussion but with implementation of neuroinformatics tools. We adopted a new volumetric approach to characterize the significant subdivisions and determined the relationships between the parcellation schemes of nine most influential atlases of the human thalamus. The volumes of each atlas were 3d-reconstructed and spatially registered to the standard MNI/ICBM2009b reference volume of the Human Brain Atlas in the MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) space (Mai and Majtanik, 2017). This normalization of the individual thalamus shapes allowed for the comparison of the nuclear regions delineated by the different authors. Quantitative cross-comparisons revealed the extent of predictability of territorial borders for 11 area clusters. In case of discordant parcellations we re-analyzed the underlying histological features and the original descriptions. The final scheme of the spatial organization provided the frame for the selected terms for the subdivisions of the human thalamus using on the (modified) terminology of the Federative International Programme for Anatomical Terminology (FIPAT). Waiving of exact individual definition of regional boundaries in favor of the statistical representation within the open MNI platform provides the common and objective (standardized) ground to achieve concordance between results from different sources (microscopy, imaging etc.).