Hamed Y. Mesri1, Anneriet M. Heemskerk1, Max A. Viergever1, and Alexander Leemans1
Despite previous reviews on the limitations of using probabilistic fiber tractography techniques for assessing the “strength” of brain connectivity, these tractography techniques are still being used for this purpose. The objective of this work is to characterize the reliability of probabilistic tractography for investigating connectivity “strength”. To this end, we demonstrate that the sensitivity of reconstructing fiber tracts with respect to the noise level and/or the choice of number of gradient directions is high, suggesting that the interpretation of such results for assessing the “strength” of connectivity should be used with extreme caution.
