Coregistered H&E- and VEGF-stained histology slides with diffusion tensor imaging data at 200 μm resolution in meningioma tumors

Mean diffusivity (MD) and fractional anisotropy (FA) obtained with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) have been associated with cell density and tissue anisotropy across tumors, but these associations have been challenged at the microscopic level and several additional histological features have been suggested as contributing to MD and FA. To facilitate investigation of the biological underpinnings of DTI parameters, we performed ex-vivo dMRI at 200 μm isotropic resolution on 16 excised meningioma tumor samples. The samples together span a variety of microstructural features: six different meningioma types and two different grades. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) was used to produce maps such as MD, FA, in-plane FA (FAIP), axial diffusivity (AD) or radial diffusivity (RD). The maps were coregistered to H&E (hematoxylin & eosin) and VEGF-stained histological slides. In this repository, we provide raw and analysed DTI maps coregistered to H&E- and VEGF-stained histology slides, as well as an example analysis of the data that aims to quantify the degree to which cell density (CD), structure anisotropy (SA), as determined from histology, in comparison with convolutional neural network (CNN) account for the intra-tumor variability of MD and FAIP in meningioma tumors. The pipeline used to process the raw DTI data and the coregistration tools are hosted by GitHub and the code related to the our example analysis are available here. Please refer and cite our two journal articles mentioned in the section References below for further information on the processing and if you find this data useful. We hope that data can be used in research and education concerning the link between the meningioma microstructure and parameters obtained by diffusion MRI.