How many streamlines are required for reliable probabilistic tractography? Solutions for microstructural measurements and neurosurgical planning

Autor: Marcela I. Cespedes, Lee B. Reid, Kerstin Pannek
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Adult
Computer science
Cognitive Neuroscience
Datasets as Topic
050105 experimental psychology
030218 nuclear medicine & medical imaging
lcsh:RC321-571
Probabilistic tractography
White matter
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Streamline count
Range (statistics)
medicine
Image Processing
Computer-Assisted
Humans
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Streamlines
streaklines
and pathlines
Diffusion Tractography
Prospective Studies
Image resolution
lcsh:Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Reliability (statistics)
Bootstrapping (statistics)
Diffusion tractography
Human Connectome Project
business.industry
05 social sciences
Reproducibility of Results
Pattern recognition
Diffusion weighted imaging
White Matter
Reproducibility
Power analysis
medicine.anatomical_structure
Diffusion Tensor Imaging
Neurology
Bootstrapping
Artificial intelligence
business
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Tractography
Diffusion MRI
Zdroj: NeuroImage, Vol 211, Iss, Pp 116646-(2020)
ISSN: 1095-9572
Popis: Diffusion MRI tractography is commonly used to delineate white matter tracts. These delineations can be used for planning neurosurgery or for identifying regions of interest from which microstructural measurements can be taken. Probabilistic tractography produces different delineations each time it is run, potentially leading to microstructural measurements or anatomical delineations that are not reproducible. Generating a sufficiently large number of streamlines is required to avoid this scenario, but what constitutes “sufficient” is difficult to assess and so streamline counts are typically chosen in an arbitrary or qualitative manner. This work explores several factors influencing tractography reliability and details two methods for estimating this reliability. The first method automatically estimates the number of streamlines required to achieve reliable microstructural measurements, whilst the second estimates the number of streamlines required to achieve a reliable binarised trackmap than can be used clinically. Using these methods, we calculated the number of streamlines required to achieve a range of quantitative reproducibility criteria for three anatomical tracts in 40 Human Connectome Project datasets. Actual reproducibility was checked by repeatedly generating the tractograms with the calculated numbers of streamlines. We found that the required number of streamlines varied strongly by anatomical tract, image resolution, number of diffusion directions, the degree of reliability desired, the microstructural measurement of interest, and/or the specifics on how the tractogram was converted to a binary volume. The proposed methods consistently predicted streamline counts that achieved the target reproducibility. Implementations are made available to enable the scientific community to more-easily achieve reproducible tractography.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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