Evidence for the Improved Biological Interpretability of White Matter Connectivity Derived Following Tractogram Filtering Using SIFT

Robert E. Smith¹, Jacques-Donald Tournier¹, Fernando Calamante¹, Alan Connelly¹

SIFT (Spherical-deconvolution Informed Filtering of Tractograms) has recently been proposed as a method for improving the correspondence between a whole-brain fibre-tracking reconstruction and the underlying diffusion data. Here we evaluate its utility for quantitative tractography analysis (such as connectomics) by comparing properties of tractography reconstructions before and after application of SIFT to those estimated from post-mortem brain dissection.