Faculty Bibliography

Diffusion Tenser Imaging (DTI) is becoming a routine magnetic resonance technique to study white matter properties and alterations of fiber integrity due to pathology. The advanced MRI technique needs postprocessing by adequate image analysis and visualization tools. Whereas such tools have been developed at various research centers to drive methodological and clinical research, they have not become widely available as software freely distributed to the community. We have developed an integrated software package for efficient processing, fiber tracking, and interactive visualization of DTI data. This allows even non-experts to explore DTI data and to obtain results that so far were exclusive to reseach teams with strong computer science support. This report describes our effort to combine common, well-established processing methods for DTI data, a recently developed powerful fiber tracking method and a modern image analysis and visualization environment into an integrated tool.

Diffusion Tenser Imaging (DTI) is becoming a routine magnetic resonance technique to study white matter properties and alterations of fiber integrity due to pathology. The advanced MRI technique needs postprocessing by adequate image processing and visualization tools. Analysis of DTI in clinical studies so far use manual definition of regions or interest or image matching followed by voxel-based analysis. This paper presents a novel concept that extracts major fiber bundles by tractography and provides a statistical analysis of diffusion properties along fibers, i.e. geodesic paths within the three-dimensional brain image. Fiber tracing thus serves as a sophisticated, efficient method for defining complex regions of interests along major fiber tracts not accessible otherwise. Fiber bundles extracted from a set of subjects are parametrized by arc-length and mapped to a common coordinate system centered at well-defined anatomical landmarks. The description of the methodology is guided by the example of measuring diffusion properties along the left and right cingulate. We also present preliminary results from an ongoing clinical neonatal study that studies early brain development.