Reproducibility of quantitative tractography methods applied to cerebral white matter

Abstract

Tractography based on diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) allows visualization of white matter tracts. In this study, protocols to reconstruct eleven major white matter tracts are described. The protocols were refined by several iterations of intra-and inter-rater measurements and identification of sources of variability. Reproducibility of the established protocols was then tested by raters who did not have previous experience in tractography. The protocols were applied to a DTI database of adult normal subjects to study size, fractional anisotropy (FA), and T 2 of individual white matter tracts. Distinctive features in FA and T 2 were found for the corticospinal tract and callosal fibers. Hemispheric asymmetry was observed for the size of white matter tracts projecting to the temporal lobe. This protocol provides guidelines for reproducible DTI-based tract-specific quantification.

Natural biological variation of white matter microstructure is accentuated in Huntington's disease

“…Finally, we performed fiber‐tracking between the primary visual cortex (V1) and the visual thalamus, the inferior fronto‐occipital fasciculus (IFOF), the inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) and the middle and posterior corpus callosum (see Supporting Information Table S1 for further details). Masks were created using the Anatomy Toolbox, the WFU PickAtlas (Maldjian, Laurienti, Kraft, & Burdette, 2003) or FSL MNI template and the JHU White Matter Labels atlas (Wakana et al, 2007). All masks were defined in standard MNI space and warped into native space for each participant.…”

Frontal fasciculi and psychotic symptoms in antipsychotic-naive patients with schizophrenia before and after 6 weeks of selective dopamine D2/3 receptor blockade

“…34 Anatomic locations of significant ROIs ("cluster ROIs") were identified in Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) space using the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) white matter tractography atlas in FSL. 35,36 Next, we averaged diffusion parameters across each cluster ROI. We used STATA software version 13.1 (StataCorp) for regression analyses comprising the ordered probit model 37 and repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA).…”

DiffusionKit: A light one-stop solution for diffusion MRI data analysis

“…Panels A, B and C separately show pair-wise error maps. (Wakana et al, 2007), and both the ROI definitions and fiber tract are extremely close to the paper of Wakana et al (2007). Inter/intra-image registration across multiple modalities (Modat et al, 2010;Ourselin et al, 2001) reg_resample/reg_transform…”

“…6-8 (b = 1000 s/mm 2 , DTI modeling) from the part of the corticospinal tract (panel I) and the cingulate gyrus (panel II), which are in agreement with the Figs. 4 and 2 in (Wakana et al, 2007), respectively.…”