Experimental digital atlas of blood supply zones of the internal carotid artery

• Published in: Kliničeskaâ praktika Vol. 16; no. 1; pp. 30 - 37
• Main Authors: Gubskiy, Ilya L., Namestnikova, Daria D., Cherkashova, Elvira A., Gumin, Ivan S., Gubsky, Leonid V., Baklaushev, Vladimir P., Chekhonin, Vladimir P., Yarygin, Konstantin N.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Eco-vector 30.04.2025
• Subjects: artificial intelligence; blood supply; ischemic stroke; magnetic resonance imaging; rats
• ISSN: 2220-3095; 2618-8627
• DOI: 10.17816/clinpract642757

Background: The compilation of a neuroanatomic atlas based on a large sample is essentially a fundamental research work, but compiling a digital atlas during the epoch of wide usage of radiodiagnostics methods in the clinical and experimental practice along with using the artificial intelligence systems brings a significant applied relevance to the research. Rats are the main species of laboratory animals, in which the studies of modeling the ischemic stroke, of testing the cerebroprotective drugs and of developing new strategies of regenerative therapy of stroke consequences are carried out. At the present moment, there is no available and comprehensive digital atlas of the arterial blood supply of the rat brain, while single research works are based on small groups of animals and their histological description. Within this context, it is deemed very interesting and important to take the first step in addressing this issue. AIM: to compile an atlas of blood supply zones within the intracranial branches of the internal carotid artery in the settings of experimentally induced occlusion of the medial cerebral artery. METHODS: The archived data were used from the magnetic resonance imaging scans in rats with modeling the transient occlusion of the medial cerebral artery with a monofilament (n=243). The system of automatic brain segmentation based on artificial intelligence was used for objective mapping of the cerebral infarction area, the obtained data were added to a single coordinate space, unified and analyzed for highlighting the arterial blood supply zones. RESULTS: A digital atlas of the arterial circulation was compiled based on the intravitam data of high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging with an isotropic voxel. CONCLUSION: The compiled atlas may be used for increasing the quality of modeling the cerebral infarction by means of transient occlusion of the medial cerebral artery with a monofilament and it allows for using the additional objective parameters in the evaluation of the treatment effects in cases of experimentally induced ischemic stroke. The methodology developed by us is applicable for high-performance retrospective analysis of the neurovisualization data from the ischemic stroke patients, obtained within a framework of the implementation of the Vascular Medicine Program in the Russian Federation.