ID: 216730 Comparing Tractography Methods for Preoperative Deep Brain Stimulation Planning in Essential Tremor Patients

Abstract

Accurate lead placement is essential to successful treatment with deep brain stimulation (DBS). The Ventralis Intermediate Nucleus (VIM) of the thalamus has been identified as a surgical target for DBS neuromodulation of motor input with successful outcomes [1-3]. To aid in this, prospective pre-operative tractography can be implemented for targeting the VIM in ET patients [4,5]. For this, FSL’s ball-and-stick model based probabilistic tracking” (Probtrackx) has been validated to be an effective tractography method (TM) [5]. However, with many other tractography widely available and embedded in commercial surgical platforms, there is benefit in evaluating the relative performance of tractography methods (TMs). Here, we assessed the relative performance of five TMs from the MRTRIX toolbox: three of these techniques were based on fiber orientation distribution functions (ODFs) represented by spherical harmonic series: iFOD1, iFOD2, iFOD-rk4, and two tensor-based models: Tensor-Deterministic, and Tensor-Probabilistic.