1. Registration-free analysis of diffusion MRI tractography data across subjects through the human lifespan
- Author
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Qiuyun Fan, Margaret A. Sheridan, Juliet Y. Davidow, Marisa O. Hollinshead, Leah H. Somerville, Rosario M. Santillana, Trey Hedden, Jared A. Nielsen, Elizabeth Beam, Megan C. Garrad, Anastasia Yendiki, Viviana Siless, Aya Hamadeh, Emily E. Smith, Michelle K. Drews, Koene R. A. Van Dijk, Constanza M. Vidal Bustamante, and Jenna Snyder
- Subjects
Adult ,Similarity (geometry) ,Brain development ,Adolescent ,Computer science ,Cognitive Neuroscience ,Longevity ,050105 experimental psychology ,Article ,Hierarchical clustering ,lcsh:RC321-571 ,Diffusion MRI ,Normalized cuts ,03 medical and health sciences ,Young Adult ,0302 clinical medicine ,Connectome ,Image Processing, Computer-Assisted ,Cluster Analysis ,Humans ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Cluster analysis ,Child ,lcsh:Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry ,Aged ,Aged, 80 and over ,Human Connectome Project ,Euclidean space ,business.industry ,05 social sciences ,Brain ,Pattern recognition ,Middle Aged ,Diffusion Tensor Imaging ,Neurology ,Metric (mathematics) ,Female ,Artificial intelligence ,business ,Tractography ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Algorithms - Abstract
Diffusion MRI tractography produces massive sets of streamlines that need to be clustered into anatomically meaningful white-matter bundles. Conventional clustering techniques group streamlines based on their proximity in Euclidean space. We have developed AnatomiCuts, an unsupervised method for clustering tractography streamlines based on their neighboring anatomical structures, rather than their coordinates in Euclidean space. In this work, we show that the anatomical similarity metric used in AnatomiCuts can be extended to find corresponding clusters across subjects and across hemispheres, without inter-subject or inter-hemispheric registration. Our proposed approach enables group-wise tract cluster analysis, as well as studies of hemispheric asymmetry. We evaluate our approach on data from the pilot MGH-Harvard-USC Lifespan Human Connectome project, showing improved correspondence in tract clusters across 184 subjects aged 8-90. Our method shows up to 38% improvement in the overlap of corresponding clusters when comparing subjects with large age differences. The techniques presented here do not require registration to a template and can thus be applied to populations with large inter-subject variability, e.g., due to brain development, aging, or neurological disorders.
- Published
- 2019