Journal article

Connectomes from streamlines tractography: Assigning streamlines to brain parcellations is not trivial but highly consequential

Chun-Hung Yeh, Robert E Smith, Thijs Dhollander, Fernando Calamante, Alan Connelly

NEUROIMAGE | ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE | Published : 2019

Abstract

When using diffusion MRI streamlines tractograms to construct structural connectomes, ideally, each streamline should connect exactly 2 regions-of-interest (i.e. network nodes) as defined by a given brain parcellation scheme. However, the ill-posed nature of termination criteria in many tractography algorithms can cause streamlines apparently being associated with zero, one, or more than two grey matter (GM) nodes; streamlines that terminate in white matter or cerebrospinal fluid may even end up being assigned to nodes if the definitions of these nodes are not strictly constrained to genuine GM areas, resulting in a misleading connectome in non-trivial ways. Based on both in-house MRI data a..

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Grants

Awarded by Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology


Awarded by 16 NIH Institutes and Centers


Funding Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia, the Australian Research Council (ARC), and the Victorian Government's Operational Infrastructure Support Program for their support. C.-H. Yeh is supported by a Postdoctoral Research Abroad Fellowship funded by Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST 105-2917-I-564-040). Data were provided in part by the Human Connectome Project, WU-Minn Consortium (Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil; 1U54MH091657) funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University.