SIFT2: Enabling dense quantitative assessment of brain white matter connectivity using streamlines tractography.
作者信息
Smith Robert E, Tournier Jacques-Donald, Calamante Fernando, Connelly Alan
机构信息
Imaging Division, Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Heidelberg, Victoria, Australia.
Imaging Division, Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Heidelberg, Victoria, Australia; Department of Medicine, Austin Health and Northern Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; Centre for the Developing Brain, King's College London, London, United Kingdom; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
出版信息
Neuroimage. 2015 Oct 1;119:338-51. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.06.092. Epub 2015 Jul 8.
Diffusion MRI streamlines tractography allows for the investigation of the brain white matter pathways non-invasively. However a fundamental limitation of this technology is its non-quantitative nature, i.e. the density of reconstructed connections is not reflective of the density of underlying white matter fibres. As a solution to this problem, we have previously published the "spherical-deconvolution informed filtering of tractograms (SIFT)" method, which determines a subset of the streamlines reconstruction such that the streamlines densities throughout the white matter are as close as possible to fibre densities estimated using the spherical deconvolution diffusion model; this permits the use of streamline count as a valid biological marker of connection density. Particular aspects of its performance may have however limited its uptake in the diffusion MRI research community. Here we present an alternative to this method, entitled SIFT2, which provides a more logically direct and computationally efficient solution to the streamlines connectivity quantification problem: by determining an appropriate cross-sectional area multiplier for each streamline rather than removing streamlines altogether, biologically accurate measures of fibre connectivity are obtained whilst making use of the complete streamlines reconstruction.