Projects:FiberTractStatistics

Objective: We are developing methods for analyzing diffusion tensor data along fiber tracts. The goal is to be able to make statistical group comparisons with fiber tracts as a common reference frame for comparison.

Progress: Software for the fiber tracking and statistical analysis along the tracts has been implemented. The statistical methods for diffusion tensors are implemented as ITK code as part of the DTI Software Infrastructure project. The methods have been validated on a repeated scan of a healthy individual. This work has been published as a conference paper (MICCAI 2005) and a journal version (MEDIA 2006). Our recent IPMI 2007 paper includes a nonparametric regression method for analyzing data along a fiber tract.

References:

• Fletcher, P.T., Tao, R., Jeong, W.-K., Whitaker, R.T., "A Volumetric Approach to Quantifying Region-to-Region White Matter Connectivity in Diffusion Tensor MRI," to appear Information Processing in Medical Imaging (IPMI) 2007.
• Corouge, I., Fletcher, P.T., Joshi, S., Gilmore, J.H., and Gerig, G., "Fiber Tract-Oriented Statistics for Quantitative Diffusion Tensor MRI Analysis," Medical Image Analysis 10 (2006), 786--798.
• Corouge, I., Fletcher, P.T., Joshi, S., Gilmore J.H., and Gerig, G., Fiber Tract-Oriented Statistics for Quantitative Diffusion Tensor MRI Analysis, Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS, James S. Duncan and Guido Gerig, editors, Springer Verlag, Vol. 3749, Oct. 2005, pp. 131 -- 138
• C. Goodlett, I. Corouge, M. Jomier, and G. Gerig, A Quantitative DTI Fiber Tract Analysis Suite, The Insight Journal, vol. ISC/NAMIC/ MICCAI Workshop on Open-Source Software, 2005, Online publication: http://hdl.handle.net/1926/39 .

Key Investigators:

• UNC: Isabelle Corouge, Casey Goodlett, Guido Gerig
• Utah: Tom Fletcher, Ross Whitaker

Links:

• Diffusion Tensor Statistics Progress Report

Scatter plot of the original FA data through the genu of the corpus callosum of a normal brain.

Regression of FA data; solid line represents the mean and dotted lines the standard deviation.