Introduction to Structural Connectivity
Maxime Descoteaux1

1Université de Sherbrooke, Canada

Synopsis

Introductory course for people seeking to learn about the fundamental of structural connectivity and building the “connectome” using diffusion MRI tractography.

Target audience

New graduate students and researchers/clinicians seeking to learn about the fundamental of structural connectivity and building the “connectome” using diffusion MRI tractography.

Objectives

The audience will learn how to build a structural connectivity matrix using diffusion MRI tractography. The audience will learn to be cautious of the limitations tractography and connectome reconstruction.

Purpose

The purpose is to learn how not to use tractography as a press-button procedure (black-box), be cautious of the important methodological choices to make and be careful in the interpretations done using connectomes from tractography.

Methods

Several tractography methods will be presented, such as deterministic, probabilistic and global techniques. A special emphasis will be put on seeding, advanced filtering and streamline selection strategies.

Results

The impact of the methods mentioned above will be shown on healthy brain datasets. Some results, precautions and suggestions exist in the literature. For example, in [1, 2, 3, 4].

Discussion

A special attention will be given to the pitfalls and limitations of the methods, and also, to the false interpretations that can be made from the structural connectivity matrices.

Acknowledgements

Université de Sherbrooke Institutional Research Chair in NeuroInformatics

References

  1. Jeurissen, B., Descoteaux, M., Mori, S., & Leemans, A. (2017). Diffusion MRI fiber tractography of the brain. NMR in Biomedicine, e3785.
  2. Jones, D.K., Knösche, T.R., Turner, R. White Matter Integrity, Fiber Count, and Other Fallacies: The Do’s and Don’ts of Diffusion MRI. NeuroImage. 2012 S1053-8119
  3. Maier-Hein, K. H., Neher, P. F., Houde, J.-C., Côté, M.-A., Garyfallidis, E., Zhong, J., … Descoteaux, M. (2017). The challenge of mapping the human connectome based on diffusion tractography. Nature Communications, 8(1), 1349.
  4. Sotiropoulos, S. N., & Zalesky, A. (2017). Building connectomes using diffusion MRI: why, how and but. NMR in Biomedicine, e3752.
Proc. Intl. Soc. Mag. Reson. Med. 27 (2019)