Tract-Based Morphometry

Lauren J. O'Donnell, C.-F. Westin, Alexandra J. Golby
Tenth International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI '07)
Volume 4792, Pages 161-168
2007

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Abstract

Multisubject statistical analyses of diffusion tensor images in regions of specific white matter tracts have commonly measured only the mean value of a scalar invariant such as the fractional anisotropy (FA), ignoring the spatial variation of FA along the length of fiber tracts. We propose to instead perform tract-based morphometry (TBM), or the statistical analysis of diffusion MRI data in an anatomical tract-based coordinate system. We present a method for automatic generation of white matter tract arc length parameterizations, based on learning a fiber bundle model from tractography from multiple subjects. Our tract- based coordinate system enables TBM for the detection of white matter differences in groups of subjects. We present example TBM results from a study of interhemispheric differences in FA.

Group fiber bundle modeling in the arcuate fasciculus (top) and cingulum (bottom). Input fiber bundles (a) with fibers colored by subject. Fiber embedding according to trajectory similarity (b): each fiber is represented as a point and colored according to subject. The embedding produces a prototype fiber for the bundle model (c). In (a) and (b), for visual clarity a random subset of the data is shown. In (b), the original 10D embedding was reduced to 2D for display using multidimensional scaling.

Reference

O'Donnell LJ, Westin CF, Golby AJ. Tract-based morphometry. In Tenth International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI '07), volume 4792 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Brisbane, Australia, 2007;161-168.

Bibtex entry

@InProceedings{odonnellMICCAI07,
  author         = {Lauren J. O'Donnell and Carl-Fredrik Westin and Alexandra  
                   J. Golby},                                                  
  title          = {Tract-Based Morphometry},                                  
  booktitle      = {Tenth International Conference on Medical Image Computing  
                   and  Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI '07)},          
  year           = {2007},                                                     
  volume         = {4792},                                                     
  pages          = {161--168},                                                 
  series         = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},                        
  address        = {Brisbane, Australia}
}

Grants

NIH U41-RR019703 (IGT), NIH P41-RR13218 (NAC), NIH R01-MH074794