Meeting Banner
Abstract #2739

Quantitative Validation of White Matter Fiber Tractography by use of an Anatomically Realistic Synthetic Diffusion Tensor Phantom

Van de Walle R, Fieremans E, Achten R, Dedeene Y, D'Asseler Y, Lemahieu I, Delputte S
Ghent University

Current clinical use of diffusion tensor fiber tractography is limited due to the lack of a golden standard to validate this technique. By taking into account the environmental architectural information proffered by in vivo density regularized fiber tracking, we were able to construct a noise-free synthetic diffusion tensor dataset, originating from a ground-truth fiber distribution that resembles the true white matter anatomy as accurate as possible. The phantom was used to quantitatively study the influence of noise on several tractography algorithms. MRI acquisition artifacts can be incorporated into the phantom as well.