Variability of Diffusion Tensor Characteristics in Human Brain Templates: Effect of the Number of Subjects Used for the Development of the Templates

Shengwei Zhang¹, John D. Carew², Konstantinos Arfanakis¹

Development of a diffusion tensor (DT) brain template that is not biased by the properties of a single subject requires averaging of the DT information from multiple subjects. The purpose of this study was to investigate the variability of DT characteristics in templates developed using different numbers of subjects. The variability of template DT properties decreased as the number of subjects increased. Furthermore, DT templates constructed from 30 subjects demonstrated high stability in tensor properties of voxels with FA=(0.6,1]. When considering voxels with FA=(0.2-1], more than 60 subjects were necessary in order to achieve sufficiently high stability in tensor properties.