title: Automatic Population HARDI White Matter Tract Clustering by Label Fusion of Multiple Tract Atlases.
abstract: Automatic labeling of white matter fibres in diffusion-weighted brain MRI is vital for comparing brain integrity and connectivity across populations, but is challenging. Whole brain tractography generates a vast set of fibres throughout the brain, but it is hard to cluster them into anatomically meaningful tracts, due to wide individual variations in the trajectory and shape of white matter pathways. We propose a novel automatic tract labeling algorithm that fuses information from tractography and multiple hand-labeled fibre tract atlases. As streamline tractography can generate a large number of false positive fibres, we developed a top-down approach to extract tracts consistent with known anatomy, based on a distance metric to multiple hand-labeled atlases. Clustering results from different atlases were fused, using a multi-stage fusion scheme. Our "label fusion" method reliably extracted the major tracts from 105-gradient HARDI scans of 100 young normal adults.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, Department of Neurology, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Jin
authors.affiliation: University of Queensland, Brisbane St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia.
authors.forename: Yonggang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.affiliation: Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Herston, QLD 4029, Australia.
authors.forename: Liang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhan
authors.forename: Junning
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Greig I
authors.initials: GI
authors.lastname: de Zubicaray
authors.forename: Katie L
authors.initials: KL
authors.lastname: McMahon
authors.forename: Nicholas G
authors.initials: NG
authors.lastname: Martin
authors.forename: Margaret J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Wright
authors.forename: Paul M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Thompson