A Novel Average Curves Tractography Technique - Validation Using a Physical Phantom

Nagulan Ratnarajah¹, Andy Simmons², Ali Hojjat¹

Probabilistic tractography algorithms differ from deterministic algorithms in that they take into account the uncertainty in fibre orientation. However, visualization of deterministic streamline trajectories is similar to the expected white matter fibre tracts, whereas the output of probabilistic methods may be harder to interpret and connectivity maps from probabilistic methods can leak into unexpected regions of white matter. In this study, we present a deterministic version of probabilistic tractography, which results in a single well defined trajectory for every major connection from a seed point using an average-curves approach. We evaluated the method on a physical-phantom and compared the results with the ground-truth.