Localization of the Locus Coeruleus in MRI via Coordinate Regression

The locus coeruleus (LC) is a small nucleus in the brain stem. It is gaining increasing interest of the neuroscientific community due to its potentially important role in the pathogenesis of several neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. In this study, an existing LC segmentation approach has been improved by adding a preceding LC localization to reduce false positive segments. For the localization, we propose a network that can be trained using coordinate regression and allows insights into its function via attention maps.