Methodological considerations on tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS)

By Michael Bach, Frederik Bernd Laun, Alexander Leemans, Chantal M. W. Tax, Geert Jan Biessels, Bram Stieltjes, Klaus Hermann Maier-Hein. NeuroImage, 2014

451 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Having gained a tremendous amount of popularity since its introduction in 2006, tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) can now be considered as the standard approach for voxel-based analysis (VBA) of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data. Aiming to improve the sensitivity, objectivity, and interpretability of multi-subject DTI studies, TBSS includes a skeletonization step that alleviates residual image misalignment and obviates the need for data smoothing. Although TBSS represents an elegant and user-friendly framework that tackles numerous concerns existing in conventional VBA methods, it has limitations of its own, some of which have already been detailed in recent literature. In this work, we present general methodological considerations on TBSS and report on pitfalls that have not been described previously. In particular, we have identified specific assumptions of TBSS that may not be satisfied under typical conditions. Moreover, we demonstrate that the existence of such violations can severely affect the reliability of TBSS results. With TBSS being used increasingly, it is of paramount importance to acquaint TBSS users with these concerns, such that a well-informed decision can be made as to whether and how to pursue a TBSS analysis. Finally, in addition to raising awareness by providing our new insights, we provide constructive suggestions that could improve the validity and increase the impact of TBSS drastically.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd4efc7973dd8e1f4a53f1cb128491790de683f8

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In Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health

In Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

Citations in the corpus

Investigating white matter fibre density and morphology using fixel-based analysis (2017, methodology): “, 2006), this approach is likely to suffer from inaccurate FA-based projection in regions of crossing fibres (Bach et al., 2014; De Groot et al., 2013; Schwarz et al., 2014), and lack of fibre-specific inference when investigating voxel-wise measures such as FA.”
Connectivity-based fixel enhancement: Whole-brain statistical analysis of diffusion MRI measures in the presence of crossing fibres (2015, background): “Over the last two decades, VBA has been applied in many ﬁ elds of neuroimaging to investigate quantitative information derived from image intensity (e.g. positron emission tomography (Worsleyetal., 1992) and functionalMRI (Fristonetal., 1995)) and image morphology (e.g. voxel-based morphometry (Ashb”