Yurui Gao1, 2, Ann S. Choe1, 2, Xia Li1, Iwona Stepniewska3, Adam W. Anderson1, 4
1VUIIS, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United States; 2BME, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United States; 3Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United States; 4BME, Radiology and Radiological Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United States
In our previous study, we validated DTI-tractography-based measures of primary motor area (M1) cortical-cortical connectivity. To further understand our previous result of validation, in this study we investigated the agreement between DTI-tractography-derived white matter pathways and histological pathways. We reconstructed the 3D pathway of histological fibers as well as DTI fibers originating from the M1 forelimb subarea in the squirrel monkey and then quantitatively measured the agreement between the DTI-derived pathway and the histology. We also describe potential reasons for the failure of DTI tractography to align perfectly with histological tracts.