Cerebellar Surface Reconstruction (Cerecon)

• Applicant: Dr.-Ing. Robert Dahnke
• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience ; Clinical Neurology; Neurosurgery and Neuroradiology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556008132

The cerebellum plays a key role in learning and coordinating motor skills and is also involved in higher cognitive functions such as attention, emotion and behaviour. However, its complex structure cannot be adequately captured by common in-vivo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques, leading to significant differences compared to microscopic studies, which leads to considerable differences compared to microscopic studies. Although surface-based techniques have demonstratedproven their superiority in modelling the neocortex, their cerebellar application to the cerebellum is extremely challengingdemanding and has only been performedcarried out only in isolatedtwo individual cases. The aim of thisthe project is therefore to develop the first cerebellarum-specific surface reconstruction model that exploits the regular and self-similar nature of the cerebellum to reduce imaging artefacts and to perform a stepwise reconstruction from lower to higher anatomical levels, which is mainly limited by the input resolution. The focus is on the reconstruction of sublobular structures in ordinary structural T1-weighted images, which allows for a widebroad application of new morphometric measures and mapping to other modalities, and at the same time is the starting point for the reconstruction of folia in ultra-high resolution data. The resulting cerebellar surfaces will not only allow a more accurate and reliable mapping of other modalities (e.g. functional MRI data), but will also support the estimation of various novel surface measurements for the first time. Validation will be performed on manually reconstructed cerebelli, while large data sets will be used for general evaluation and template generation. The new cerebellar surface reconstruction (Cerecon) will be integrated into the widely used and freely available Computation Anatomy Toolbox (CAT), which has been co-developed by the applicant and is an extension of the Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) package. For the first time, Cerecon would allow complete surface-based analysis of the cortex and, with its more appropriate modelling, could make a significant contribution to bridging the gap between micro- and macroscopic observations in structural and functional data.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants