White matter fiber tractography: Why we need to move beyond DTI

Abstract

Object. Diffusion-based MRI tractography is an imaging tool increasingly used in neurosurgical procedures to generate 3D maps of white matter pathways as an aid to identifying safe margins of resection. The majority of white matter fiber tractography software packages currently available to clinicians rely on a fundamentally flawed framework to generate fiber orientations from diffusion-weighted data, namely diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). This work provides the first extensive and systematic exploration of the practical limitations of DTI-based tractography and investigates whether the higher-order tractography model constrained spherical deconvolution provides a reasonable solution to thes..