A multicenter time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography dataset and multifaceted cerebrovascular atlases of rhesus monkeys

Mapping the vascular organization of the primate brain is fundamental to understanding neurovascular coupling and translating therapeutics for neurovascular and neurodegenerative disorders. Although the rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) is an indispensable experimental model, existing anatomical studies of its cerebrovasculature have been largely limited to small-scale, ex vivo descriptions, while high-resolution, in vivo, population-level statistical atlases of the rhesus monkey cerebrovasculature remain limited. Here, we present a multicenter time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography dataset of 55 healthy male rhesus monkeys from three sites, together with population-level statistical atlases of the whole brain and the Circle of Willis (CoW). These multifaceted brain maps characterize morphological and geometric properties, including vessel probability, diameter, tissue-to-vessel distance, stenosis, tortuosity, deviation, and angulation. Our atlases revealed a complete anterior CoW in all subjects, an overall completeness rate of 98.2%, and a consistent diameter hierarchy across arterial segments, from the largest basilar and internal carotid arteries to the smallest superior cerebellar, posterior communicating, and anterior choroidal arteries. In a small pilot cohort of a non-human primate model of amyloid precursor protein overexpression, atlas-based z-score mapping suggested a possible reduction in diameter z-scores in the first segment of the posterior cerebral artery relative to controls. These publicly available group-level atlases, derived exclusively from male subjects, provide a spatially referenced framework for cerebrovascular organization and morphology in male rhesus macaques, establishing normative reference ranges and enabling voxel-wise z-score mapping to evaluate potential focal vascular alterations in a disease-model context, with applications in cross-species comparison and translational neurovascular research.