RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Building a Tissue-unbiased Brain Template of Fibre Orientation Distribution and Tractography with Multimodal Registration
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2022.04.13.488117
DO 10.1101/2022.04.13.488117
A1 Lv, Jinglei
A1 Zeng, Rui
A1 Ho, Mai Phuong
A1 D’Souza, Arkiev
A1 Calamante, Fernando
YR 2022
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/04/14/2022.04.13.488117.abstract
AB A brain template provides a standard space for statistical analysis of brain structure and function. For decades, the T1- and T2-weighted brain templates have been widely used for brain grey matter anatomical and functional analysis. However, T1- and T2-weighted templates provide very limited information about the axonal organization within the white matter. Recent advances in Diffusion MRI have enabled the detailed modelling of the axonal fibre orientation distribution (FOD) in white matter. Therefore, building a FOD template is essential for more robust white matter anatomy related analysis; however, it is important that this template aligns well with the cortical and subcortical structures. From such a FOD template, a tractography template can be also generated by fibre tracking algorithms, which can be used for subsequent applications, such as to perform the joint structural and functional analysis while ensuring rigorous fibre-to-fibre correspondence. In this paper, we explore the potential of generating the FOD template based on multimodal registration, in order to constrain the tempalte unbiased to both white and grey matter. We combine the information from T1-weighted, T2-weighted and Diffusion MRI to generate a coherent transformation for FOD registration and template generation. Our FOD template preserves the structural details at the white-grey matter boundary. To illustrate the benefit of this new approach, the resulting tractography template was used for joint structural-functional connectivity analysis.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.