Journal Article

The structure of the serotonin system: A PET imaging study

Beliveau, Vincent, Greve, Douglas N., Ozenne, Brice, Strother, Stephen, Svarer, Claus, Knudsen, Gitte Moos, Ganz, Melanie

2020

Overview

The human brain atlas of the serotonin (5-HT) system does not conform with commonly used parcellations of neocortex, since the spatial distribution of homogeneous 5-HT receptors and transporter is not aligned with such brain regions. This discrepancy indicates that a neocortical parcellation specific to the 5-HT system is needed. We first outline issues with an existing parcellation of the 5-HT system, and present an alternative parcellation derived from brain MR- and high-resolution PET images of five different 5-HT targets from 210 healthy controls. We then explore how well this new 5-HT parcellation can explain mRNA levels of all 5-HT genes. The parcellation derived here represents a characterization of the 5-HT system which is more stable and explains the underlying 5-HT molecular imaging data better than other atlases, and may hence be more sensitive to capture region-specific changes modulated by 5-HT. •We evaluate a previous parcellation of the 5-HT system and propose an improvement.•Our new parcellation achieves a higher explained variance and is more stable.•The parcellation includes less regions, so region-based analysis are less penalized.•mRNA data for the HTR1A, HTR1F and HTR2C genes are well captured by the parcellation.

• Publisher: Elsevier Inc,Elsevier Limited,Elsevier
• Subject: Adult / Atlases as Topic / Brain / Brain - diagnostic imaging / Brain - metabolism / Cluster Analysis / Clustering / Datasets / Humans / Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods / Medical imaging / MRI / mRNA / Neocortex / Neuroimaging / Neuroimaging - methods / PET / Positron emission tomography / Positron-Emission Tomography - methods / Receptors, Serotonin - metabolism / RNA, Messenger - metabolism / Serotonin / Serotonin - genetics / Serotonin - metabolism / Spatial distribution / Structure