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Abstract #0278

SIFT2: Enabling dense quantitative assessment of brain white matter connectivity using streamlines tractography

Robert Elton Smith 1 , J-Donald Tournier 1,2 , Fernando Calamante 1,3 , and Alan Connelly 1,3

1 The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Heidelberg, Victoria, Australia, 2 Centre for the Developing Brain, King's College London, London, London, United Kingdom, 3 Medicine (Austin Health / Northern Health), The University of Melbourne, Heidelberg, Victoria, Australia

Accurate evaluation of brain white matter connectivity using diffusion MRI tractography requires development of robust quantitative methods. We propose a successor to the "Spherical-deconvolution Informed Filtering of Tractograms (SIFT)" method, entitled SIFT2, which determines an appropriate weighting factor for every streamline in a tractogram in a manner that matches the streamline densities to the underlying fibre volumes as estimated by spherical deconvolution. The result is a dense whole-brain streamlines reconstruction where the sum of streamline weights between two areas is a proportional estimate of the cross-sectional area of the axonal pathway connecting those regions; a truly quantitative measure of white matter connectivity.


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