ProjectWeek200706:ContrastingTractographyMeasures
Key Investigators
- BWH: Marek Kubicki, Doug Markant, Doug Terry, Lauren O'Donnell, Katharina Quintus, Jorge Alvarado
Objective
A new initiative has begun in response to a shared vision among Cores 1, 3 and 5 that the field of medical image analysis would be well served by work in the area of validation, calibration and assessment of reliability. Discussions have continued among our participants since then and as a result a plan for the initial work on this front has been articulated.
- There are many outstanding questions in this domain that we agree are interesting and worth considering such as:
1. What benchmarks should be used to assess performance of a NAMIC Toolkit algorithm?
2. How can we assess the performance of an algorithm if we have no access to the ground truth of what it is measuring (e.g. the white matter of the brain with tractography)?
3. What statistical methods are most appropriate for quanitfying and testing significance of these assessments?
The answers to these questions will vary depending on the specific algorithm and its application. The group agreed that the best way to proceed was to chose one very specific example that is highly relevant to the NAMIC work to date and focus efforts on that. The methods that arise from this can then be applied to additional areas.
We agreed to begin by studying the results obtained by applying each of the tractography tools to a single dataset and then gathering to present the results to one another and discuss how best to quantify the similarities and differences.
- Final goals are:
1. To write up the results for publication with all of us as contributing authors.
2. To make the dataset and our analyzed results available to the scientific community
3. To use our findings to begin to establish benchmarking methods for the NAMIC toolkit.
Approach
Our approach for analyzing diffusion tensors is ...
Progress
Software ...
