A Probabilistic Atlas and Reference System for the Human Brain

This chapter provides an overview of a probabilistic atlas and reference system of the human brain—the International Consortium for Brain Mapping (ICBM). ICBM is aimed at developing a voxel-based, probabilistic atlas of the human brain from a large sample of normal individuals, ages 18 to 90, with a wide ethnic and racial distribution. The data set is designed to contain a substantial amount of demographic information describing the subjects' background, family history, habits, diet, and many other features. The ICBM atlas will use functional landmarks to augment atlasing methods that are currently based primarily on macroscopic structural anatomy in the same way that these anatomic methods now augment atlasing methods that were previously based on stereotaxis with simple proportional scaling. In addition to the derived data organized in the databases, digital libraries and data warehouses of complete data sets will also be provided through the ICBM project to the neuroimaging community. These data sets include those with “raw” data, “scalped” data sets, and intensity-normalized, “scalped” data sets.