2016 Summer Project Week/Structural-functional measurements

Key Investigators

• Yannick Suter
• Lauren J. O'Donnell

Project Description

Left AF tracts with putative Broca and Wernicke's areas (yellow) with T2 image in the background.

Objective

• Tractography data and language fMRI activations are available for 10 neurosurgical patients and in the connectome dataset. We are evaluating different distance measurements between the fMRI activations and fiber tracts to find structural-functional relationships.
• Evaluate different structural-functional measurements (e.g. tract endpoints in fMRI activations / tracts passing through / within a distance threshold).
• Find tracts that are related to language across patients.

Approach, Plan

• Before Project Week:
  • Run distance measurement for patient data with language fMRI activations
• During Project Week:
  • Evaluate distance measurements
  • Find suitable statistics to evaluate measurements.
  • Improve distance measurement (e.g. line interpolation)
  • Find fiber tracts that are related to language across patients
  • If this works well, apply this method to some patients from the connectome dataset.

Progress

• Computed distances with different methods for patient dataset
• Evaluated concurrence for measurement methods across patients
• Improved distance measurement with line interpolation, added line end segment instead of using only fiber endpoints, reduced the influence of outlier fibers