Diffusion Imaging-Based Subdivision of the Human Hypothalamus: A Magnetic Resonance Study with Clinical Implications

The hypothalamus and its subdivisions are involved in many neuropsychiatric conditions such as affective disorders, schizophrenia or narcolepsy but parcellations of hypothalamic subnuclei have hitherto been feasible only with histological techniques in post-mortem brains. In an attempt to map subdivisions of the hypothalamus in vivo we analyzed the directionality information from high-resolution diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance images of healthy volunteers. We acquired T1-weighted and diffusion-weighted scans in ten healthy subjects at 3 T. In the T1-weighted images we manually delineated an individual mask…