Tractography optimization using quantitative T1 mapping in the human optic radiation

Diffusion MRI tractography is essential for reconstructing white-matter projections in the living human brain. Yet tractography results miss some projections and falsely identify others. A challenging example is the optic radiation (OR) that connects the thalamus and the primary visual cortex. Here,...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.) Fla.), 2018-11, Vol.181, p.645-658
Main Authors: Schurr, Roey, Duan, Yiran, Norcia, Anthony M., Ogawa, Shumpei, Yeatman, Jason D., Mezer, Aviv A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Brain
Datasets
Hypotheses
Magnetic resonance imaging
Multiple sclerosis
Myelin
Optic radiation
Relaxometry
Substantia alba
Thalamus
Tractography evaluation
Visual cortex
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Diffusion MRI tractography is essential for reconstructing white-matter projections in the living human brain. Yet tractography results miss some projections and falsely identify others. A challenging example is the optic radiation (OR) that connects the thalamus and the primary visual cortex. Here, we tested whether OR tractography can be optimized using quantitative T1 mapping. Based on histology, we proposed that myelin-sensitive T1 values along the OR should remain consistently low compared with adjacent white matter. We found that complementary information from the T1 map allows for increasing the specificity of the reconstructed OR tract by eliminating falsely identified projections. This T1-filtering outperforms other, diffusion-based tractography filters. These results provide evidence that the smooth microstructural signature along the tract can be used as constructive input for tractography. Finally, we demonstrate that this approach can be applied in a case of multiple sclerosis, and generalized to the HCP-available MRI measurements. We conclude that multimodal MRI microstructural information can be used to eliminate spurious tractography results in the case of the OR. [Display omitted] •A novel T1 mapping framework for optimizing the optic radiation (OR) tractography.•Myelin-sensitive T1 mapping is used to filter falsely identified OR projections.•The T1-filtering of the OR is complementary to diffusion-based filters.•The OR tractography filtering is generalized to HCP's myelin-sensitive contrasts.
ISSN:1053-8119
1095-9572
DOI:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.06.060