Estimation of the Uncertainty of Diffusion MRI Fiber Tracking Parameters with Residual Bootstrap

BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION: A recent comparison of bootstrap approaches in the estimation of uncertainty of voxelwise DTI parameters such as FA and ADC demonstrated that the application of residual bootstrap (RB) provided an unbiased empirical non-parametric approach to characterizing the parameter uncertainty [1]. Fiber tracking (FT) based on diffusion MR has important applications for structural connectivity analyses of brain diseases [2] and pre-operative FT of the brain [3]. The RB analysis on voxelwise DTI parameters is not appropriate to characterize the uncertainty in the large 3D regions defined by FT. Therefore, we will illustrate the appropriate implementation of RB to obtain the uncertainty of fiber tracking parameters (FTPs) such as the number of streamlines, the length of a track, and the volume of a track in a fiber bundle.