AxTract: Toward Microstructure Informed Tractography - Inria - Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Human Brain Mapping Année : 2017

AxTract: Toward Microstructure Informed Tractography

Résumé

Diffusion-weighted (DW) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tractography has become the tool of choice to probe the human brain's white matter in vivo. However, tractography algorithms produce a large number of erroneous streamlines (false positives), largely due to complex ambiguous tissue configurations. Moreover, the relationship between the resulting streamlines and the underlying white matter microstructure characteristics remains poorly understood. In this work, we introduce a new approach to simultaneously reconstruct white matter fascicles and characterize the apparent distribution of axon diameters within fascicles. To achieve this, our method, AxTract, takes full advantage of the recent development DW-MRI microstructure acquisition, modelling and reconstruction techniques. This enables AxTract to separate parallel fascicles with different microstructure characteristics, hence reducing ambiguities in areas of complex tissue configuration. We report a decrease in the incidence of erroneous streamlines compared to the conventional deterministic tractography algorithms on simulated data. We also report an average increase in streamline density over 15 known fascicles of the 34 healthy subjects. Our results suggest that microstructure information improves tractography in crossing areas of the white matter. Moreover, AxTract provides additional microstructure information along the fascicle that can be studied alongside other streamline-based indices. Overall, AxTract provides the means to distinguish and follow white matter fascicles using their microstructure characteristics, bringing new insights into the white matter organization. This is a step forward in microstructure informed tractography, paving the way to a new generation of algorithms able to deal with intricate configurations of white matter fibres and providing quantitative brain connectivity analysis.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
axtract_manuscript.pdf (13.47 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
Loading...

Dates et versions

hal-01564041 , version 1 (18-07-2017)

Identifiants

Citer

Gabriel Girard, Alessandro Daducci, Laurent Petit, Jean-Philippe Thiran, Kevin Whittingstall, et al.. AxTract: Toward Microstructure Informed Tractography. Human Brain Mapping, 2017, 38 (11), pp.5485-5500. ⟨10.1002/hbm.23741⟩. ⟨hal-01564041⟩
681 Consultations
330 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More