Abstract #2062

Magnetic ROIs enable improved tractography accuracy through oriented prior

Maxime Chamberland^1,2,3, Benoit Scherrer³, Sanjay Prabhu³, Joseph Madsen³, David Fortin⁴, Kevin Whittingstall^2,5, Maxime Descoteaux¹, and Simon K Warfield³

¹Computer science, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada, ²Nuclear Medicine and Radiobiology, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada, ³Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, ⁴Division of Neurosurgery and Neuro-Oncology, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada, ⁵Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada

Streamline tractography algorithms infer connectivity by following directions which are maximally aligned at every voxel. This rule has even been the definition of the probability of connectivity, with the difference in current and next orientation being defined as uncertainty in connectivity. However, our experiments demonstrate that in regions where multiple fiber pathways interdigitate (e.g. temporal lobe), this heuristic is inadequate and does not necessarily reflect the underlying human brain architecture. Furthermore, we demonstrate that inference of connectivity can be improved by incorporating anatomical knowledge of the expected fiber orientation in regions where this information is known. We applied this heuristic through a new tractography region of interest (ROI) and demonstrate that it provides improved delineation of the expected anatomy.

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