RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Evaluating the reliability of human brain white matter tractometry
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.02.24.432740
DO 10.1101/2021.02.24.432740
A1 John Kruper
A1 Jason D. Yeatman
A1 Adam Richie-Halford
A1 David Bloom
A1 Mareike Grotheer
A1 Sendy Caffarra
A1 Gregory Kiar
A1 Iliana I. Karipidis
A1 Ethan Roy
A1 Ariel Rokem
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/02/24/2021.02.24.432740.abstract
AB The validity of research results depends on the reliability of analysis methods. In recent years, there have been concerns about the validity of research that uses diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI) to understand human brain white matter connections in vivo, in part based on reliability of the analysis methods used in this field. We defined and assessed three dimensions of reliability in dMRI-based tractometry, an analysis technique that assesses the physical properties of white matter pathways: (1) reproducibility, (2) test-retest reliability and (3) robustness. To facilitate reproducibility, we provide software that automates tractometry (https://yeatmanlab.github.io/pyAFQ). In measurements from the Human Connectome Project, as well as clinical-grade measurements, we find that tractometry has high test-retest reliability that is comparable to most standardized clinical assessment tools. We find that tractometry is also robust: showing high reliability with different choices of analysis algorithms. Taken together, our results suggest that tractometry is a reliable approach to analysis of white matter connections. The overall approach taken here both demonstrates the specific trustworthiness of tractometry analysis and outlines what researchers can do to demonstrate the reliability of computational analysis pipelines in neuroimaging.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.