Chantal M.W. Tax1,2, Carl-Fredrik Westin2, Tom Dela Haije3, Andrea Fuster3, Max A. Viergever1, Luc Florack3, and Alexander Leemans1
1Image Sciences Institute, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands, 2Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, 3Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands
The theory
that brain fiber pathways cross in sheet-like structures has been a topic of
debate. This theory is mainly supported by qualitative findings using diffusion
MRI tractography, and a comprehensive quantitative
analysis is necessary. To this end, an approach was developed to quantify the
degree of “sheetness” based on constructing a large amount of loops with
tractography. This approach, however, is computationally expensive, cannot cope
well with missing peaks, and is only an approximation when the loops are not
infinitesimally small. Here we present an alternative, fast, robust, and
elegant approach for the computation of the degree of sheetness.
