Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) enables non-invasive, cyto-architectural mapping of in vivo tissue microarchitecture through voxel-wise mathematical modeling of multiple magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisitions, each differently sensitized to water diffusion. DTI computations are fundamentally estimation processes and are sensitive to noise and artifacts. Despite widespread adoption in the neuroimaging community, maintaining consistent DTI data quality remains challenging given the propensity for patient motion, artifacts associated with fast imaging techniques, and the possibility of hardware changes/failures. Furthermore, the quantity of data acquired per voxel, the non-linear estimation process, and numerous potential use cases complicate traditional visual data inspection approaches. Currently, quality inspection of DTI data has relied on visual inspection and individual processing in DTI analysis software programs (e.g. DTIPrep, DTI-studio). However, recent advances in applied statistical methods have yielded several different metrics to assess noise level, artifact propensity, quality of tensor fit, variance of estimated measures, and bias in estimated measures. To date, these metrics have been largely studied in isolation. Herein, we select complementary metrics for integration into an automatic DTI analysis and quality assurance pipeline. The pipeline completes in 24 hours, stores statistical outputs, and produces a graphical summary quality analysis (QA) report. We assess the utility of this streamlined approach for empirical quality assessment on 608 DTI datasets from pediatric neuroimaging studies. The efficiency and accuracy of quality analysis using the proposed pipeline is compared with quality analysis based on visual inspection. The unified pipeline is found to save a statistically significant amount of time (over 70%) while improving the consistency of QA between a DTI expert and a pool of research associates. Projection of QA metrics to a low dimensional manifold reveal qualitative, but clear, QA-study associations and suggest that automated outlier/anomaly detection would be feasible.
Pubmed ID: 23637895 RIS Download
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This repository stores and provides opportunities for collaboration through Matlab code, libraries, and configuration information for projects in early stage development. The MASI research laboratory concentrates on analyzing large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal neuroimaging data. Specifically, they are interested in population characterization with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), multi-parametric studies (DTI, sMRI, qMRI), and shape modeling.
View all literature mentionsFree, open-source, object-oriented software package for analysis and reconstruction of Diffusion MRI data, tractography and connectivity mapping. The toolkit implements standard techniques, such as diffusion tensor fitting, mapping fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity, deterministic and probabilistic tractography. It also contains more specialized and cutting-edge techniques, such as Monte-Carlo diffusion simulation, multi-fibre and HARDI reconstruction techniques, multi-fibre PICo, compartment models, and axon density and diameter estimation. Camino has a modular design to enable construction of processing pipelines that include modules from other software packages. The toolkit is primarily designed for unix platforms and structured to enable simple scripting of processing pipelines for batch processing. Most users use linux, MacOS or a unix emulator like cygwin running under windows. However, the core code is written in Java and thus is simple to call from other platforms and programming environments, such as matlab running under unix or windows.
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