Abstract #1441

Preliminary Results on the Use of STAPLE for Evaluating DT-MRI Tractography in the Absence of Ground Truth

Sonia Pujol¹, Carl-Fredrik Westin², Ross Whitaker³, Guido Gerig³, Tom Fletcher³, Vincent Magnotta⁴, Sylvain Bouix⁵, Ron Kikinis¹, William M. Wells III¹, Randy Gollub⁶

¹Surgical Planning Laboratory, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; ²Laboratory of Mathematics in Imaging, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA; ³Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT; ⁴University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA; ⁵Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory, Boston, MA; ⁶Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA

We describe preliminary results obtained from a framework for evaluating DT-MRI tractography algorithms that uses STAPLE (Simultaneous Truth and Performance Level Estimation) to estimate the performance of the methods in the absence of ground truth. In tests on a mathematical phantom we show that STAPLE is able to characterize fiber tracking performance by comparing its findings to true performance findings. We apply the framework to four methods operating on four white matter fasciuli in real data, and describe the results of this new approach for validating tractography.