Tractometer: online evaluation system for tractography

Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv. 2012;15(Pt 1):699-706. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-33415-3_86.

Abstract

We have developed a tractometer: an online evaluation system for tractography processing pipelines. One can now evaluate the end effects on fiber tracts of different acquisition parameters (b-value, number of directions, denoising or not, averaging or not), different local estimation techniques (tensor, q-ball, spherical deconvolution, spherical wavelets) and to different tractography parameters (masking, seeding, stopping criteria). At this stage, the system is solely based on a revised FiberCup analysis, but we hope that the community gets involved and provides us with new phantoms, new algorithms, third party libraries and new geometrical metrics, to name a few. We believe that the new connectivity analysis and tractography characteristics proposed can highlight limits of the algorithms and contribute in elucidating the open questions in fiber tracking: from raw data to connectivity analysis.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Brain / pathology*
  • Brain Mapping / methods
  • Diagnostic Imaging / methods*
  • Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods
  • Humans
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Neurology / methods
  • Online Systems
  • Phantoms, Imaging
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Software