Comparison of fiber tracts derived from in-vivo DTI tractography with 3D histological neural tract tracer reconstruction on a macaque brain

Julien Dauguet, Sharon Peled, Vladimir Berezovskii, Thierry Delzescaux, Simon K. Warfield, Richard Born, C.-F. Westin
NeuroImage
Volume 37, Pages 530-538
2007

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Abstract

Since the introduction of diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) as a method for examining neural connectivity, its accuracy has not been formally evaluated. In this study, we directly compared connections that were visualized using injected neural tract tracers (WGA-HRP) with those obtained using in-vivo diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tractography. First, we injected the tracer at multiple sites in the brain of a macaque monkey; second, we reconstructed the histological sections of the labeled fiber tracts in 3D; third, we segmented and registered the fibers (somatosensory and motor tracts) with the anatomical in-vivo MRI from the same animal; and last, we conducted fiber tracing along the same pathways on the DTI data using a classical diffusion tracing technique with the injection sites as seeds. To evaluate the performance of DTI fiber tracing, we compared the fibers derived from the DTI tractography with those segmented from the histology. We also studied the influence of the parameters controlling the tractography by comparing Dice superimposition coefficients between histology and DTI segmentations. While there was generally good visual agreement between the two methods, our quantitative comparisons reveal certain limitations of DTI tractography, particularly for regions at remote locations from seeds. We have thus demonstrated the importance of appropriate settings for realistic tractography results.

Front, side and top views (from top to bottom) showing both the segmentation derived from histology (in blue) and the best results of the DTI tractography (fibers in brown) for the three settings tested: anisotropy influence, curvature influence and step size influence (from left to right) inside a surface rendering of the brain mask.

Reference

Dauguet J, Peled S, Berezovskii V, Delzescaux T, Warfield SK, Born R, Westin CF. Comparison of fiber tracts derived from in-vivo dti tractography with 3d histological neural tract tracer reconstruction on a macaque brain. NeuroImage 2007;37:530-538.

Bibtex entry

@Article{dauguetNeuroImage07,
  Author         = "Julien Dauguet and Sharon Peled and Vladimir Berezovskii   
                   and  Thierry Delzescaux and Simon K. Warfield and Richard   
                   Born  and Carl-Fredrik Westin",                             
  title          = "Comparison of fiber tracts derived from in-vivo DTI        
                   tractography with 3D histological neural tract tracer       
                   reconstruction on a macaque brain",                         
  journal        = "NeuroImage",                                               
  year           = "2007",                                                     
  volume         = {37},                                                       
  pages          = {530--538}
}

Grants

NIH R01-MH50747, NIH P30-EY12196, NIH R21-MH67054, NIH R01-RR021885, NIH R01-HL074942, NIH P01-HD18655, NIH P41-RR13218 (NAC), NIH U41-RR019703, CIMIT, NMSS RG-3478A2, NIH U54-EB005149 (NAMIC)