Interested in the thalamus or thalamic nuclei?

Current state-of-the-art methods for visualization and segmentation of thalamic nuclei are lagging behind. We are a group of international researchers with diverse backgrounds (neuroimaging, neuroscience, neuroradiology..) with a common aim to address this challenging and critical problem of accurate and fast segmentation of thalamic nuclei as well as validation and application of these methods in basic neuroscience and clinical applications. The international Thalamic Nuclei Neuroimaging Group recently convened an e-symposium on the role of the different thalamic nuclei and their segmentation in neuroimaging studies. This symposium has highlighted that there are currently no guidelines for the neuroimaging of the thalamus, leading to results that may be difficult to reconcile.

Vision

Besides fostering collaborations, our vision is for 3 or 4 subgroups focused on neuro-anatomy, imaging, image processing, and applications to evolve organically out of this symposium and subsequent meetings. We also hope to put out position papers, share standardized data sets with manual labels, and disseminate new cutting edge methods for thalamic segmentation, and meet in person, of course, in the near future !

This group has identified current and future challenges and recommended future directions which include:

Cytoarchitecture of the thalamus

MRI acquisition sequences

Thalamic nuclei segmentation

Clinical
applications

Check out our last publication on Nature!

A roadmap towards standardized neuroimaging approaches for human thalamic nuclei

This paper reviews current methods for segmenting individual thalamic nuclei in neuroimaging data, highlighting the challenges and limitations of existing techniques. We argue that the thalamus is often overlooked in neuroimaging studies, and that a standardized approach to segmenting its nuclei is crucial for advancing our understanding of its role in both health and disease. The roadmap we propose for future research includes establishing a multidisciplinary group to define "ground truths" for thalamic nuclei, developing harmonized nomenclature and acquisition protocols, and creating large open-source datasets. This roadmap aims to foster greater collaboration and enhance our ability to study this essential brain structure.