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Abstract #4021

SWI-Informed Diffusion Tensor Tractography

Michiel Kleinnijenhuis1,2, Markus Barth1,3, Daniel C. Alexander4, Anne-Marie van Cappellen van Walsum2,5, David Gordon Norris1,3

1Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, Netherlands; 2Department of Anatomy, University Medical Centre St. Radboud, Nijmegen, Netherlands; 3Erwin L. Hahn Institute for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Essen, Germany; 4Centre for Medical Image Computing, Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, United Kingdom; 5MIRA Institute for Biomedical Technology and Technical Medicine, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands


Diffusion tensor tractography suffers from limited spatial resolution in the reconstruction of white matter structure. Susceptibility weighted images (SWI) also shows white matter structure, but can be acquired at a much higher resolution. A method is proposed to inform the tractography algorithm with gradient information (structure tensor) of the SWI intensity. Tracking was informed by SWI by projecting the DT tracking direction onto the plane orthogonal to the first eigenvector of the structure tensor. Main pathways were largely similar for DT and SWI-informed tractography, but tracts also showed marked differences between branching patterns and tract paths.