Abstract
The validity of research results depends on the reliability of analysis methods. In recent years, there have been concerns about the validity of research that uses diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI) to understand human brain white matter connections in vivo, in part based on the reliability of analysis methods used in this field. We defined and assessed three dimensions of reliability in dMRI-based tractometry, an analysis technique that assesses the physical properties of white matter pathways: (1) reproducibility, (2) test-retest reliability, and (3) robustness. To facilitate reproducibility, we provide software that automates tractometry (https://yeatmanlab.github.io/pyAFQ). In measurements from the Human Connectome Project, as well as clinical-grade measurements, we find that tractometry has high test-retest reliability that is comparable to most standardized clinical assessment tools. We find that tractometry is also robust: showing high reliability with different choices of analysis algorithms. Taken together, our results suggest that tractometry is a reliable approach to analysis of white matter connections. The overall approach taken here both demonstrates the specific trustworthiness of tractometry analysis and outlines what researchers can do to establish the reliability of computational analysis pipelines in neuroimaging.
Highlights
The white matter of the brain contains the long-range connections between distant cortical regions
The delineation of well-known anatomical pathways overcomes many of the concerns about confounds in diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI)-based tractography [13, 14], because “brain connections derived from diffusion MRI
An example of the process and result of the tract profile extraction process is shown in Fig. S3 together with the results of this process across the 18 major white matter pathways for all subjects in the Human Connectome Project test-retest (HCP-TR) dataset
Summary
The white matter of the brain contains the long-range connections between distant cortical regions. Collections of streamlines that match the location and direction of major white matter pathways within an individual can be generated with different strategies: using probabilistic [5, 6] or streamline-based [7, 8] atlases or known anatomical landmarks [9,10,11,12]. Because these are models of the anatomy, we refer to these estimates as bundles to distinguish them from the anatomical pathways themselves. The delineation of well-known anatomical pathways overcomes many of the concerns about confounds in dMRI-based tractography [13, 14], because “brain connections derived from diffusion MRI
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