Kerstin Pannek1, Thomas Kampf2,
Jane Mathias3, Greg Brown4, Jamie Taylor5,
Olivier Salvado6, Stephen Rose7
1Centre for Advanced Imaging,
the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; 2Department
of Experimental Physics 5, University of Wuerzburg, Wuerzburg, Germany; 3School
of Psychology, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia; 4MRI
Unit, Royal Adelaide Hospital, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia; 5Radiology,
Royal Adelaide Hospital, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia; 6Biomedical
Imaging, Australian eHealth Research Centre, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia;
7Centre for Clinical Research, the University of Queensland,
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Streamline number and streamline length are quantitative tractography metrics that are influenced by white matter pathology. We propose to assess streamline length in a fully automated voxel-wise manner. The length distribution within an individual voxel can be described by a mixture of Gaussian distributions, and compared across subjects. Voxel-wise length distributions appear to be highly reproducible over time. We demonstrate how this new method can be used to identify fibre populations affected by white matter pathology.
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