Project Week/Template
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.
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Key Investigators
- BWH: Antonio Tristán-Vega, Demian Wasserman, Carl-Fredrik Westin
Objective
In the last project week we delivered an implementation of the Finsler method to compute the connectivity among regions in the white matter through High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging. Such method provides a costs map from a given seeding point/region to any other point within the brain. The aim in this project is tracing the minimum cost paths between two given regions in the white matter, which will in turn provide the desired streamlines.
Approach, Plan
The method is described in detail in the reference below. To compute the costs map we use the Fast Sweeping algorithm: upon convergence, this method provides the minimum cost at each image voxel together with the direction such cost was reached from. Thus, the "backtracing" of these directions from a given point to the seeding point/region provides the minimum cost path.
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.
Delivery Mechanism
This work will be delivered to the NA-MIC Kit as a Slicer Module
References
- Fletcher P, Tao R, Jeong W, Whitaker R. A volumetric approach to quantifying region-to-region white matter connectivity in diffusion tensor MRI. Inf Process Med Imaging. 2007;20:346-358. PMID: 17633712.
- Corouge I, Fletcher P, Joshi S, Gouttard S, Gerig G. Fiber tract-oriented statistics for quantitative diffusion tensor MRI analysis. Med Image Anal. 2006 Oct;10(5):786-98. PMID: 16926104.
- Corouge I, Fletcher P, Joshi S, Gilmore J, Gerig G. Fiber tract-oriented statistics for quantitative diffusion tensor MRI analysis. Int Conf Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv. 2005;8(Pt 1):131-9. PMID: 16685838.
- Goodlett C, Corouge I, Jomier M, Gerig G, 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 .
