Authors
Koji Sakai
Sho Iwasa
Takashi Azuma
Koji Koyamada
Sadami Tsutsumi
Abstract
Tractography is one of the most promised MR based technique to visualize the nerve bundles (white matter pathways) as 3D objects. Neuroradiologist has already been non-invasively observing the orientation and the form of typical nerve bundles by using tractography. However, at the present, there is no comparison tool for tractography which can reveal what is a normal and/or an abnormal form of a nerve bundle, quantitatively.
To resolve this problem, this paper proposed a new tractography based system which enables a quantitative analysis of white matter properties, such as form, orientation, and diffusivity. The proposed system realized a quantitative difference of neuronal pathways by comparing two nerve bundles which were calculated from different diffusion weighted MRI data sets. This proposed system was applied to three kinds of neural pathways comparison in human brain white matter; 1) individual differences in one healthy person, 2) between one healthy person and another healthy person. From the results of these comparisons, differences of neural pathways were obtained quantitatively when the parameters were set appropriately. However, some of the comparisons showed incorrect results. The reasons of these incorrect might be caused from the limitation of tractography algorithm.
CR Categories and Subject Descriptors
Physical Sciences and Engineering, Earth and atmospheric sciences, Mathematics and statistics,
Physics