Study of the variability of short association bundles on a HARDI database

The construction of an atlas of the human brain connectome, in particular, the cartography of fiber bundles of superficial white matter (SWM) is a complex and unachieved task. Its description is essential for the understanding of human brain function and the study of several pathologies. In this work we applied an automatic white matter bundle segmentation method proposed in the literature for the analysis of the variability of a big amount of superficial white matter bundles. The method was applied to 30 subjects of a high quality HARDI database, adding several processing steps in order to improve the results. Then we calculated some indices for studying the variability of 40 SWM fiber bundles from each hemisphere, and we constructed a model of these bundles in the MNI standard space.