Chun-Hung Yeh1, Robert Elton Smith1, Thijs Dhollander1, Fernando Calamante1, and Alan Connelly1
This study highlights the issue of using the
common strategy for assigning individual streamlines to an atlas-based brain parcellation.
This process is non-trivial and can introduce ambiguity into connectome
quantification. In many fibre-tracking algorithms, track termination criteria can
cause premature termination of streamlines within WM or CSF, which can result
in up to ~50–80% of streamlines failing in identifying pairwise connections
between nodes from streamline endpoints. Our results demonstrate that such issue
can be largely ameliorated through the combination of biologically meaningful
track terminations and an appropriate node assignment mechanism. This could
therefore be advantageous to structural connectome construction.