NeuroImage (Jan 2020)

The structure of the serotonin system: A PET imaging study

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

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 205
p. 116240

Abstract

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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.

Keywords