Extracting Brain Connectivity from Diffusion MRI [Life Sciences]

This article gives a short introduction to dMRI tractography methods. Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) is an MRI modality that has gained tremendous popularity the past five years and is especially promising for imaging the white matter in brain. The dMRI technique has raised hopes in the neuroscience community for a better understanding of the fiber tract anatomy of the human brain. Various methods have been proposed to visualize the anatomy of fiber pathways and to derive connectivity between different parts of the brain in vivo. While there are strong indications that dMRI reveals information about the fiber pathways in the brain, it is important to stress that the explicit measurements are of water diffusion, and not of the axons themselves. This technique allows us to use fibers from multiple brains as input, and thereby obtain a simultaneous clustering and matching of the bundles in all brains.