Mark J. Lowe1, Ken E. Sakaie1, Jian Lin1, Lael Stone2, Micheal D. Phillips1
1Imaging Institute, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH, United States; 2Neurologic Institute, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH, United States
We have previously introduced pathway dependent diffusion measures as a way of determining functionally relevant disease burden in multiple sclerosis. This method determines the mean diffusion properties (i.e. FA, radial diffusivity, longitudinal diffusivity) along a pathway determined with probabilistic tractography. There is a significant drawback to the method in that the sensitivity can be quite low due to the fact that tissue diffusion parameters will vary substantially along some pathways. In this study, we utilize a parametric approach to determining local pathway diffusion properties and derive a statistical approach to determine if a given fiber path contains significant disease burden.