Stereotactic Atlas of the Human Thalamus and Basal Ganglia PDF

Preface

The field of stereotactic functional neurosurgery for the treatment of patients with chronic therapy-resistant functional brain disorders has made significant progress due to better knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of brain networks implicated in the different pathologies. The surgical approaches, whether through chronic stimulations or therapeutic lesions, are directed at retuning dysfunctional brain systems, with targets aimed mostly at pallidal, prethalamic, or thalamic levels.

For all surgical interventions, the identification of the target and its precise anatomical localization are most important to obtain durable and consistent results, with low risks for sideeffects. Accurate anatomical localization is even more mandatory in case of neuroradiologically guided surgery where there is no physiological verification of the target (e.g., radiosurgery).

In spite of the progress in magnetic resonance image (MRI) resolution for guiding stereotactic neurosurgery, the precision of the targeting, in particular in the thalamus and subthalamic area, still depends on the quality of the anatomical atlas used to determine the three-dimensional target coordinates. The necessity to develop a new atlas based on multiarchitectonic parcellation and integrating high spatial resolution and stereotactic precision motivated our work for the last fifteen years.

The first atlas focused on the thalamus was published in 1997 and was the first step toward our goal. The present book is an extension of the atlas to the basal ganglia, with complementary information related to fiber tracts, interindividual variability and MRI correlations, which we hope will contribute significantly to the establishment of the anatomical framework indispensable for stereotactic neurosurgery and neuroimaging.