Huiling Peng1, Shengwei Zhang1, Robert John Dawe1, Anton Orlichenko2, Gady Agam3, Konstantinos Arfanakis1
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA; 2Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA; 3Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA
Human brain diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) templates developed to date use the mean tensor to summarize the DTI information from a group of subjects. However, spatial normalization of DTI data between subjects contains inaccuracies, and the mean of imperfectly matched tensors may have significantly different characteristics than the individual tensors. It is well known that, in distributions with statistical outliers, the median may be a more accurate summary statistic than the mean. The purpose of this work was to investigate the role of the mean and median tensors in summarizing the DTI information from a group of subjects.