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Diffusion MRI and anatomic tracing in the same brain reveal common failure modes of tractography
- Source :
- NeuroImage, Vol 239, Iss, Pp 118300-(2021), NeuroImage
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- Elsevier, 2021.
-
Abstract
- Anatomic tracing is recognized as a critical source of knowledge on brain circuitry that can be used to assess the accuracy of diffusion MRI (dMRI) tractography. However, most prior studies that have performed such assessments have used dMRI and tracer data from different brains and/or have been limited in the scope of dMRI analysis methods allowed by the data. In this work, we perform a quantitative, voxel-wise comparison of dMRI tractography and anatomic tracing data in the same macaque brain. An ex vivo dMRI acquisition with high angular resolution and high maximum b-value allows us to compare a range of q-space sampling, orientation reconstruction, and tractography strategies. The availability of tracing in the same brain allows us to localize the sources of tractography errors and to identify axonal configurations that lead to such errors consistently, across dMRI acquisition and analysis strategies. We find that these common failure modes involve geometries such as branching or turning, which cannot be modeled well by crossing fibers. We also find that the default thresholds that are commonly used in tractography correspond to rather conservative, low-sensitivity operating points. While deterministic tractography tends to have higher sensitivity than probabilistic tractography in that very conservative threshold regime, the latter outperforms the former as the threshold is relaxed to avoid missing true anatomical connections. On the other hand, the q-space sampling scheme and maximum b-value have less of an impact on accuracy. Finally, using scans from a set of additional macaque brains, we show that there is enough inter-individual variability to warrant caution when dMRI and tracer data come from different animals, as is often the case in the tractography validation literature. Taken together, our results provide insights on the limitations of current tractography methods and on the critical role that anatomic tracing can play in identifying potential avenues for improvement.
- Subjects :
- Male
Computer science
Cognitive Neuroscience
Models, Neurological
Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Tracing
Axonal Transport
050105 experimental psychology
Article
Diffusion MRI
Probabilistic tractography
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Validation
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Animals
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Analysis method
Fluorescent Dyes
Sampling scheme
Biological Variation, Individual
Fourier Analysis
Orientation (computer vision)
business.industry
05 social sciences
Brain
Reproducibility of Results
Pattern recognition
Isoquinolines
Macaca mulatta
White Matter
Frontal Lobe
Diffusion Tensor Imaging
Neurology
ROC Curve
Artificial intelligence
business
Tractography
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Brain circuitry
RC321-571
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 10959572
- Volume :
- 239
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- NeuroImage
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....1c792af22108ee4f6d2b3ff01072d604