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
Affiliations
Vincent Beliveau
Neurobiology Research Unit, Copenhagen, Denmark
Brice Ozenne
Neurobiology Research Unit, Copenhagen, Denmark; Section of Biostatistics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Stephen Strother
Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest, and Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Douglas N. Greve
Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Claus Svarer
Neurobiology Research Unit, Copenhagen, Denmark
Gitte Moos Knudsen
Neurobiology Research Unit, Copenhagen, Denmark; Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Melanie Ganz
Neurobiology Research Unit, Copenhagen, Denmark; Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark; Corresponding author. Neurobiology Research Unit, Copenhagen, Denmark.
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.
