Tractography - where do we go from here?

By Saâd Jbabdi, Heidi Johansen-Berg. Brain Connectivity, 2011

651 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Diffusion tractography offers enormous potential for the study of human brain anatomy. However, as a method to study brain connectivity, tractography suffers from limitations, as it is indirect, inaccurate, and difficult to quantify. Despite these limitations, appropriate use of tractography can be a powerful means to address certain questions. In addition, while some of tractography's limitations are fundamental, others could be alleviated by methodological and technological advances. This article provides an overview of diffusion magnetic resonance tractography methods with a focus on how future advances might address challenges in measuring brain connectivity. Parts of this review are somewhat provocative, in the hope that they may trigger discussions possibly lacking in a field where the apparent simplicity of the methods (compared to their functional magnetic resonance imaging counterparts) can hide some fundamental issues that ultimately hinder the interpretation of findings, and cast doubt as to what tractography can really teach us about human brain anatomy.

Subfields: Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5535448c03b8ffc6a8c62b9edfb1baf7a5e274d2

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In Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health

In Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

Citations in the corpus

The challenge of mapping the human connectome based on diffusion tractography (2017, positive): “(B) Similarly, the imaging representation of local ﬁ ber crossings can be explained by several other con ﬁ gurations 7 .”
Deterministic Diffusion Fiber Tracking Improved by Quantitative Anisotropy (2013, methodology): “if v is not 0 then w←w + f(r - R) and u'←+ f(r - R)v Accumulate the weightings using the weighting function f Δr [2] and calculate the weighted”
Advances in diffusion MRI acquisition and processing in the Human Connectome Project (2013, methodology): “For example, it is not clear that tractography can provide quantitative measures of connections between grey matter brain regions (Jbabdi and Johansen-Berg, 2011).”
The human connectome: Origins and challenges (2013, background): “…establishing the capability and limitations of diffusion imaging and tractography applied to the human brain (Dell'Acqua and Catani, 2012), as well as for characterizing the neurobiological meaning of the parameters that are accessible with these imaging methods (Jbabdi and Johansen-Berg, 2011).”
The WU-Minn Human Connectome Project: An Overview (2013, background): “Some of these are familiar (Jbabdi and Johansen-Berg, 2011), but generating and interpreting entire gray-togray connectomes bring new challenges.”