Abstract
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.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 645-658 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | NeuroImage |
| Volume | 181 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Nov 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation and ISF Grant (no. 0399306 ) awarded to A.A.M., the NSF/SBE-BSF Grants (NSF no. 1551330 and BSF no. 2015608 ) awarded to A.A.M. and J.D.Y., the National Eye Institute Grants EY018875 and EY015790 awarded to A.M.N, and a seed grant from the Eric Roland Fund for Interdisciplinary Research administered by ELSC, awarded to A.A.M. and R.S.
Funding Information:
We thank Brian A. Wandell for data collection, which was supported by the Weston Havens Foundation Grant and the Simons Foundation (Project on Scientific Transparency) Grant. Data were provided in part by the Human Connectome Project, WU-Minn Consortium (Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil; 1U54MH091657) funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research ; and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University . We thank Franco Pestilli and Cesar Caiafa for sharing code and software. Their work was supported by the NSF Grant IIS-1636893 and the NIH Grant ULTTR001108 . We thank Christine Tardif and Mallar Chakravarty for sharing data, and Brian A. Wandell, Hiromasa Takemura, Kevin Weiner and Shai Berman, Shir Filo and Batsheva Weisinger for helpful comments on this manuscript.
Funding Information:
We thank Brian A. Wandell for data collection, which was supported by the Weston Havens Foundation Grant and the Simons Foundation (Project on Scientific Transparency) Grant. Data were provided in part by the Human Connectome Project, WU-Minn Consortium (Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil; 1U54MH091657) funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University. We thank Franco Pestilli and Cesar Caiafa for sharing code and software. Their work was supported by the NSF Grant IIS-1636893 and the NIH Grant ULTTR001108. We thank Christine Tardif and Mallar Chakravarty for sharing data, and Brian A. Wandell, Hiromasa Takemura, Kevin Weiner and Shai Berman, Shir Filo and Batsheva Weisinger for helpful comments on this manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Elsevier Inc.
Keywords
- Optic radiation
- Relaxometry
- T1
- Tractography evaluation