Atlas-guided tract reconstruction for automated and comprehensive examination of the white matter anatomy.
Tractography based on diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is widely used to quantitatively analyze the status of the white matter anatomy in a tract-specific manner in many types of diseases. This approach, however, involves subjective judgment in the tract-editing process to extract only the tracts of interest. This process, usually performed by manual delineation of regions of interest, is also time-consuming, and certain tracts, especially the short cortico-cortical association fibers, are difficult to reconstruct. In this paper, we propose an automated approach for reconstruction of a large number of white matter tracts. In this approach, existing anatomical knowledge about tract trajectories (called the Template ROI Set or TRS) were stored in our DTI-based brain atlas with 130 three-dimensional anatomical segmentations, which were warped non-linearly to individual DTI data. We examined the degree of matching with manual results for selected fibers. We established 30 TRSs to reconstruct 30 prominent and previously well-described fibers. In addition, TRSs were developed to delineate 29 short association fibers that were found in all normal subjects examined in this paper (N=20). Probabilistic maps of the 59 tract trajectories were created from the normal subjects and were incorporated into our image analysis tool for automated tract-specific quantification.
Zhang
Yajing
Y
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA.
Zhang
Jiangyang
J
Oishi
Kenichi
K
Faria
Andreia V
AV
Jiang
Hangyi
H
Li
Xin
X
Akhter
Kazi
K
Rosa-Neto
Pedro
P
Pike
G Bruce
GB
Evans
Alan
A
Toga
Arthur W
AW
Woods
Roger
R
Mazziotta
John C
JC
Miller
Michael I
MI
van Zijl
Peter C M
PC
Mori
Susumu
S
D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D003198:Computer Simulation; D056324:Diffusion Tensor Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D008953:Models, Anatomic; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009413:Nerve Fibers, Myelinated / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity