On the Importance of Appropriate Fibre Population Selection in Diffusion Tractography

Jonathan D. Clayden¹, Chris A. Clark¹

While a lot of recent research in diffusion MRI has focussed on estimating the orientations of multiple fibre populations within image voxels, little attention has been given to the problem of how to effectively use this information in tractography. Typically a tractography algorithm selects a fibre direction to follow based on continuity, but we show here that a alternative approach based on prior knowledge gives substantially more robust results. Our technique is fully automated and uses a reference tract to inform the process.