Atlas-Guided Cluster Analysis of Large Tractography Datasets

نویسندگان

  • Christian Ros
  • Daniel Güllmar
  • Martin Stenzel
  • Hans-Joachim Mentzel
  • Jürgen Rainer Reichenbach
چکیده

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) and fiber tractography are important tools to map the cerebral white matter microstructure in vivo and to model the underlying axonal pathways in the brain with three-dimensional fiber tracts. As the fast and consistent extraction of anatomically correct fiber bundles for multiple datasets is still challenging, we present a novel atlas-guided clustering framework for exploratory data analysis of large tractography datasets. The framework uses an hierarchical cluster analysis approach that exploits the inherent redundancy in large datasets to time-efficiently group fiber tracts. Structural information of a white matter atlas can be incorporated into the clustering to achieve an anatomically correct and reproducible grouping of fiber tracts. This approach facilitates not only the identification of the bundles corresponding to the classes of the atlas; it also enables the extraction of bundles that are not present in the atlas. The new technique was applied to cluster datasets of 46 healthy subjects. Prospects of automatic and anatomically correct as well as reproducible clustering are explored. Reconstructed clusters were well separated and showed good correspondence to anatomical bundles. Using the atlas-guided cluster approach, we observed consistent results across subjects with high reproducibility. In order to investigate the outlier elimination performance of the clustering algorithm, scenarios with varying amounts of noise were simulated and clustered with three different outlier elimination strategies. By exploiting the multithreading capabilities of modern multiprocessor systems in combination with novel algorithms, our toolkit clusters large datasets in a couple of minutes. Experiments were conducted to investigate the achievable speedup and to demonstrate the high performance of the clustering framework in a multiprocessing environment.

برای دانلود رایگان متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

V-Bundles: Clustering Fiber Trajectories from Diffusion MRI in Linear Time

Fiber clustering algorithms are employed to find patterns in the structural connections of the human brain as traced by tractography algorithms. Current clustering algorithms often require the calculation of large similarity matrices and thus do not scale well for datasets beyond 100,000 streamlines. We extended and adapted the 2D vector field k– means algorithm of Ferreira et al. to find bundl...

متن کامل

A scalable approach to streamline tractography clustering

Introduction Diffusion tractography has become an important method for assessing white matter (WM) structure. Depending on the application, the large number of streamlines typically produced by the tracking algorithm may make the dataset difficult to handle. As there will be many streamlines corresponding to each anatomical WM tract, it is often advantageous to group them into clusters in which...

متن کامل

High-Dimensional White Matter Atlas Generation and Group Analysis

We present a two-step process including white matter atlas generation and automatic segmentation. Our atlas generation method is based on population fiber clustering. We produce an atlas which contains high-dimensional descriptors of fiber bundles as well as anatomical label information. We use the atlas to automatically segment tractography in the white matter of novel subjects and we present ...

متن کامل

DT-MRI Tractography and its Application in Cognitive Neuroscience

Recent advancement of MRI techniques and development of new methods of image analysis have allowed us to study large neural tracts within the human brain. This is based on the principle of diffusion tensor MRI that is similar to that of diffusion-weighted imaging but takes magnitude and direction of the diffusion of water into account. Using this technique we have been able to define large neur...

متن کامل

Atlas-based segmentation of white matter tracts of the human brain using diffusion tensor tractography and comparison with classical dissection

The technique of diffusion tensor tractography is gaining increasing prominence as a non-invasive method for studying the architecture of the white matter pathways in the human brain. Numerous studies have been published that attempt to identify or reconstruct particular pathways of interest. An atlas or map of all the pathways in the white matter would be particularly useful for providing deta...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره 8  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2013