Trends in Tractography and Analysis of Diffusion MRI Data

From Iibis

Carl-Fredrik Westin

Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) is an MRI modality that has gained tremendous popularity the past five years and is especially promising for imaging the white matter in the brain. The white matter is the tissue through which signals are passed between different areas of gray matter in the brain, analogous to the cables between processing units in a computer. Diffusion imaging is one of the first methods that made it possible to visualize and quantify the organization of white matter in the human brain in vivo. It has the potential to aid in the diagnosis and subsequent treatment of disorders of the central nervous system and is likely to have a major impact on assessment of white matter pathologies (e.g., schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis), quantification of abnormal white matter development, detection of stroke and trauma including traumatic brain swelling, diffuse axonal injury, and spinal trauma, as well as a large variety of brain tumors. In addition to direct clinical impact, dMRI has the potential to contribute to basic neurosciences, improving our understanding of physiological white matter development, aging, and connectivity. Extracting connectivity information from dMRI, termed "tractography", is an especially active area of research, as it promises to model the pathways of white matter tracts in the brain, by connecting local diffusion measurements into global trace-lines. In this talk I will present an overview of available dMRI tractography methods and discuss future trends in analysis of diffusion MRI data.