About Us

For several decades Igor A. Ilinsky, M.D., Ph. D. and Heli-Kristy Kultas-Ilinsky Ph.D. have studied structure and connections of the motor thalamus in different species (cat, monkey, human),  analyzing GABAergic  circuits in  these nuclei and their changes  after lesions in basal ganglia.  The content of the site reflects the latest project on the mapping of the human thalamus and its 3D reconstruction enabling viewing of individual nuclei in three different stereotactic planes. This site also provides references to the articles and presentations describing research data on which the maps are based as well as the bibliography on the synaptic relationships of subcortical and cortical afferents with thalamic projection and local circuit neurons. The 3D volume created from the nuclear maps has been co-registered with MNI space, it can be viewed and downloaded from lead-dbs.org.  Just download Lead-DBS and you’ll find it installed in there. The nifti files can be found in /templates/space/MNI_ICBM_2009b_NLIN_ASYM/atlases/Human Motor Thalamus (Ilinsky 2017).

Acknowledgements:
Contributions of Catherine Verney, UMR 676 INSERM, Université Paris7, in immunocytochemical study of the human thalamus, and Perrine Paul-Gilloteaux, Institute Curie, Paris, France,  in the work with final images and 3D reconstruction, and Andreas Horn, Charite University, Berlin, Germany in co-registering the atlas to MNI space were critical for completion of this project.
We also express our sincere gratitude and appreciation to Marina Bentivoglio, and Pasquina Marzola of Universita di Verona, Verona, Italy, for making available to us experimental MRI facility in the Department of Anatomy and help in scanning postmortem thalami.
We are indebted to Boyd Knosp and  Daniel Langstraat,  University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA, for initial work with MRI images.
Special thanks go to Alim Louis Benabid, Université de Grenoble, France, who made his laboratory facilities available for our work and provided valuable advice, critique, and help at all stages of the project.

This project was supported in part by NIH grant R01 NS36739-03, INSERM Universite Paris Diderot, Fondation Rene et Denise Planiol, and PremUP Fondation.