Abstract #0052

The Human Connectome Project: Advances in Diffusion MRI Acquisition and Preprocessing

Stamatios N. Sotiropoulos¹, Saad Jbabdi¹, Junqian Xu², Jesper L. Andersson¹, Steen Moeller², Edward J. Auerbach², Matthew F. Glasser³, David Feinberg⁴, Christophe Lenglet², David C. Van Essen³, Kamil Ugurbil², Timothy E.J. Behrens¹, Essa S. Yacoub²

¹FMRIB Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; ²Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, United States; ³Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology, Washington University, St Louis, MO, United States; ⁴Advanced MRI Technologies, Sebastopol, CA, United States

The Human Connectome Project (HCP) is an ambitious 5-year effort to map human brain connections in healthy adults. A consortium of HCP investigators will study a population of 1200 subjects using multiple imaging modalities along with extensive behavioral and genetic data. In this overview, we focus on diffusion-weighted MRI and the structural connectivity aspect of the project. We present recent advances in acquisition and preprocessing that allow us to obtain the best possible MR data quality in-vivo, while confronting with the aim of scanning many subjects. The data quality described is representative of the datasets to be released within 2013.