Yang Zhipeng, He Peiyu, Zhou Jiliu, Ding Zhaohua, Wu Xi
IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2018 Jul 17. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2018.2856829.
Fiber tractography using diffusion weighted MRI (DWI) is a primary tool for mapping structural connectivity in the human brain in vivo. However, this method suffers from a number of inherent limitations that have a significant impact on its capability in faithfully constructing fiber bundles for specific function. In this paper, a novel tractography algorithm combining DWI and functional MRI (fMRI) was proposed. Specifically, a spatio-temporal correlation tensor that characterizes the anisotropy of fMRI signals in white matter was introduced to complement the estimation of fiber orientation density function from DWI. The proposed method has been demonstrated to identify functional pathways implicated in fMRI task. It can effectively follow tracts in the genu of the corpus callosum that connects to the frontal lobe cortex, obtain connections between the thalamus and the anterior insula under sensory simulation, and reconstruct optic radiations in the visual circuit under visual stimulation. Taken together, the method we proposed in this work may benefit our understanding of structure-function relations in the human brain.
使用扩散加权磁共振成像（DWI）的纤维束成像技术是在体绘制人类大脑结构连接图谱的主要工具。然而，该方法存在一些固有局限性，这对其忠实地构建特定功能纤维束的能力产生了重大影响。本文提出了一种将DWI与功能磁共振成像（fMRI）相结合的新型纤维束成像算法。具体而言，引入了一个时空相关张量，该张量表征了白质中fMRI信号的各向异性，以补充从DWI估计纤维取向密度函数。所提出的方法已被证明能够识别fMRI任务中涉及的功能通路。它可以有效地追踪连接到额叶皮质的胼胝体膝部的纤维束，在感觉模拟下获得丘脑与前岛叶之间的连接，并在视觉刺激下重建视觉回路中的视辐射。综上所述，我们在这项工作中提出的方法可能有助于我们理解人类大脑中的结构 - 功能关系。
