Standardizing Human Brain Parcellations

Using brain atlases to localize regions of interest is a required for making neuroscientifically valid statistical inferences. These atlases, represented in volumetric or surface coordinate spaces, can describe brain topology from a variety of perspectives. Although many human brain atlases have circulated the field over the past fifty years, limited effort has been devoted to their standardization and specification. The purpose of standardization and specification is to ensure consistency and transparency with respect to orientation, resolution, labeling scheme, file storage format, and coordinate space designation. Consequently, researchers are often confronted with limited knowledge about a given atlas9s organization, which make analytic comparisons more difficult. To fill this gap, we consolidate an extensive selection of popular human brain atlases into a single, curated open-source library, where they are stored following a standardized protocol with accompanying metadata. We propose that this protocol serves as the basis for storing future atlases. To demonstrate the utility of storing and standardizing these atlases following a common protocol, we conduct an experiment using data from the Healthy Brain Network whereby we quantify the statistical dependence of each atlas label on several key phenotypic variables. The repository containing the atlases, the specification, as well as relevant transformation functions is available at https://neurodata.io/mri .