CenTauR standardized pipelines and ROIs
Brought to you by the ADIR Lab at Mayo Clinic
Contact: schwarz.christopher@mayo.edu

We implemented the SPM8 “Centiloid standard” pipeline with the published CenTauRZ regression 
constants from Leuzy et al. https://doi.org/10.1002/alz.061177. This pipeline was described 
originally in Klunk et al. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jalz.2014.07.003. We provide this 
pipeline as SPM8_Centaur.m. SPM8 must be installed in your Matlab path, and the Centaur ROIs 
(also included) must also be added to your Matlab path. 

We implemented a SPM12-based pipeline that measures SUVR in MRI space with tissue-class 
masking and population-matched Mayo Clinic Adult Lifespan Template (MCALT: 
https://www.nitrc.org/projects/mcalt/) templates and priors. We calculated SUVR across the 
calibration dataset and calibrated the pipeline to CenTauRZ units using the measurements from 
the canonical SPM8 pipeline on the same images using Deming linear regression. We implemented 
the resulting constants in this pipeline to allow it to directly output SUVR and CenTaurZ 
units for all CenTauR ROIs for all supported tau PET tracers. We provide this pipeline as 
SPM12_Centaur.m. SPM12 must be installed in your Matlab path, along with the Centaur ROIs in 
MCALT space (included) and MCALT_T1.nii (included). 

The current version of both pipelines implements CenTaurZ units, which are intended to allow 
(only) binary classification of T-/T+ across all supported tau PET tracers, using a common 
threshold. However, CenTaurZ units are NOT intended to allow comparison of quantitative tau 
PET measurements on a common scale across tracers. The latter task should instead use CenTauR 
units, which are not yet released. Upon their release, this package will also be updated to 
output CenTauR units along with the current CenTaurZ units.

The original CenTauR ROIs were designed for use with spatial normalization in SPM, and they 
align with the variant of MNI152/ICBM152 in SPM. When attempting to use these ROIs with 
higher-dimensional spatial normalization, we noticed that alignment between these ROIs and the 
higher-resolution canonical MNI space mni_icbm152_t1_tal_nlin_asym_09c was not ideal, as some 
CenTauR regions were localized more subcortically (inferior and medial) than intended. We 
segmented mni_icbm152_t1_tal_nlin_asym_09c.nii using SPM12 and used SPM12 to transform 
(deform) the CenTauR ROIs to mni_icbm152_t1_tal_nlin_asym_09c.nii space using these 
parameters. We then did the same for MCALT_T1.nii. We include both sets of the CenTauR ROIs in 
this zip, along with the originals in SPM8 space. These variants can be used in future 
pipelines that want to make use of these ROIs with higher-dimensional templates and 
normalization methods. The MCALT-space ROIs are used in our SPM12_Centaur.m. MCALT_T1.nii is 
included in this .zip. mni_icbm152_t1_tal_nlin_asym_09c can be obtained from 
https://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesAtlases/ICBM152NLin2009

More information may be found in the HAI 2024 abstract: Schwarz et al., Publicly Available 
Software and FTP calibration data for CenTauR tau PET standardization, from 
https://hai.worldeventsforum.com. 

Copyright 2024 Mayo Clinic. 