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Description
The nucleus ventralis intermedius (VIM) of the thalamus is located in the ventral part of the ventrolateral posterior thalamus and exhibits increased connectivity especially with the dentate nucleus of the cerebellum and the primary motor cortex through the dentato-rubro-thalamic tract. Selective lesioning of the VIM is a well-established neurosurgical target for the treatment of patients with severe medication-resistant tremor as it leads to a significant alleviation of this symptom. Most current image-guided techniques are based on indirect targeting using atlases (e.g. Schaltenbrand-Wahren atlas) for determining and navigating the strategy of the surgery, which has certain limits of spatial resolution and contrast. Since the precise targeting of VIM and a comprehensive understanding of its inner structure is important for the success of neurosurgical treatment we investigated the VIM in serial histological sections of ten human post mortem brains and mapped the structure according to cytoarchitectonic criteria at every 15th section. The BigBrain2 dataset was one of the investigated brains and was used to train a deep-learning model that learned to recognize cytoarchitectonic patterns based on manual delineations and predicted the delineations at every section in-between. VIM was then visualized to present a detailed anatomical model of the human VIM at microscopical resolution in order to better understand the 3D architecture and to get an overall picture of its shape and relationship to other nuclei of the thalamus.
