Tractometer: Online Evaluation System for Tractography

• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-33415-3_86
• Publication Date: 2012-09-21T12:17:16Z
• Authors: Marc-Alexandre Côté; Arnaud Boré; Gabriel Girard; Jean-Christophe H...; Maxime Descoteaux
• Keywords: Diagnostic Imaging; Brain Mapping; Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Neurology; Phantoms, Imaging; Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Brain; Humans; Reproducibility of Results; Online Systems; Algorithms; Software

We have developed a tractometer: an online evaluation system for tractography processing pipelines. One can now evaluate the end effects on fiber tracts of different acquisition parameters (b-value, number of directions, denoising or not, averaging or not), different local estimation techniques (tensor, q-ball, spherical deconvolution, spherical wavelets) and to different tractography parameters (masking, seeding, stopping criteria). At this stage, the system is solely based on a revised FiberCup analysis, but we hope that the community gets involved and provides us with new phantoms, new algorithms, third party libraries and new geometrical metrics, to name a few. We believe that the new connectivity analysis and tractography characteristics proposed can highlight limits of the algorithms and contribute in elucidating the open questions in fiber tracking: from raw data to connectivity analysis.