Organization, fine structure, and stereotaxic maps of the human Bed nucleus of the Stria terminalis.

Overview

Authors: Andrea Brandstetter¹, Sebastian Bludau¹, Hartmut Mohlberg¹, Philippe Massicotte², Alan C Evans³, Katrin Amunts^1,4

ORCID iDs: Andrea Brandstetter, Sebastian Bludau, Hartmut Mohlberg, Alan C Evans, Katrin Amunts

Institutions: Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany); National Research Council Canada (Canada); McGill University (Canada); Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (Germany)

Journal: Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.), volume 4, article IMAG.a.1260

Dates: received 10 October 2024; accepted 11 March 2026; published online 15 June 2026

Type: Research article · Language: English

License: CC BY

Identifiers: DOI 10.1162/imag.a.1260 · PMID 42312088 · PMCID PMC13271151 · OpenAlex W7160601224

Open access: diamond, a free copy (OpenAlex)

Status: data only

Categories: human (organism), cognitive (subfield)

Methods: Statistics, Smoothing, state filtering, decompositions, fMRI & imaging

Keywords: Bed nucleus of the Stria terminalis, human brain anatomy, anxiety perception, cytoarchitectonic probabilistic maps, texture analysis, BigBrain model

Topic: Advanced Neuroimaging Techniques and Applications (Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging, Medicine), according to OpenAlex

Funding: Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF Competition 2, 2015-2016); HORIZON EUROPE Framework Programme (101147319 (EBRAINS 2.0 Project))

Citations: not cited yet (Europe PMC); 69 references in the paper

Research resources: RRID:SCR_019260

Abstract

The human Bed nucleus of the Stria terminalis is a basal forebrain structure and a key player in stress response and anxiety perception. It is a heterogenous structure and consists of distinct subdivisions. However, subdivisions are not visible in routine MR imaging due to low contrast and small size, which makes the exact assignment and identification in images of the living brain difficult or even impossible. Here, we mapped the Bed nucleus in serial, cell body-stained sections of 10 human brains in its full extent, resulting in 1130 annotations. Four subdivisions, a central, dorsal, medial, and a posterior part were identified. Texture analysis was applied to further characterize the subdivisions. Two sets of maps were generated: (1) Probabilistic cytoarchitectonic maps of the Bed nucleus in MNI space, which consider interindividual variability among the brains; (2) Ultra-high-resolution maps of the four subdivisions in the BigBrain 3D histology dataset, to capture complex shape and topology at microscopical level. The maps are openly available, to serve as anatomical reference to neuroimaging studies in healthy subjects and patients and inform modeling and simulation.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

The paper links to its data, not to its authors' code: see the Data section.

The paper's code and data availability statement is in the Data section.

Tracing map

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Data

Datasets cited

doi:10.25493/1zjf-12g, at the source; found in “Data and Code Availability”

Data and Code Availability

The probabilistic maps of the bed nucleus as specific information to data (pre)processing can be found in the EBRAINS knowledge graph under https://doi.org/10.25493/1ZJF-12G (Brandstetter et al., 2021), in accordance with the FAIR guiding principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016). These maps are part of the Julich-Brain Atlas (Katrin Amunts et al., 2020) and openly available via the EBRAINS digital research infrastructure RRID:SCR_019260 (DOI: 10.25504/FAIRsharing.XO6ppp), accessible via https://ebrains.eu/service/human-brain-atlas/. No code was generated in this study.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Versions

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Version 2, 28 September 2026

Funding: added Canada First Research Excellence Fund: CFREF Competition 2, 2015-2016; HORIZON EUROPE Framework Programme: 101147319 (EBRAINS 2.0 Project)

Version 1, 27 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, pages, dates, 6 authors, 6 keywords, 68 references, 1 RRID.

Cite

This paper

Brandstetter, A., Bludau, S., Mohlberg, H., Massicotte, P., Evans, A. C., & Amunts, K. (2026). Organization, fine structure, and stereotaxic maps of the human Bed nucleus of the Stria terminalis. Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.), 4, IMAG.a.1260. https://doi.org/10.1162/imag.a.1260

BibTeX

@article{brandstetter2026organization, author = {Brandstetter, Andrea and Bludau, Sebastian and Mohlberg, Hartmut and Massicotte, Philippe and Evans, Alan C and Amunts, Katrin}, title = {{Organization, fine structure, and stereotaxic maps of the human Bed nucleus of the Stria terminalis}}, journal = {Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)}, year = {2026}, month = jun, volume = {4}, pages = {IMAG.a.1260}, publisher = {MIT Press}, issn = {2837-6056}, doi = {10.1162/imag.a.1260}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/imag.a.1260}, pmid = {42312088}, pmcid = {PMC13271151} }

RIS

TY - JOUR AU - Brandstetter, Andrea AU - Bludau, Sebastian AU - Mohlberg, Hartmut AU - Massicotte, Philippe AU - Evans, Alan C AU - Amunts, Katrin TI - Organization, fine structure, and stereotaxic maps of the human Bed nucleus of the Stria terminalis T2 - Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) J2 - Imaging Neurosci (Camb) PY - 2026 DA - 2026/06/15 VL - 4 SP - IMAG.a.1260 SN - 2837-6056 PB - MIT Press DO - 10.1162/imag.a.1260 UR - https://doi.org/10.1162/imag.a.1260 LA - en ER -

CSL-JSON

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