Muscle diffusion tensor imaging can indirectly provide information about muscular microstructure and architecture, which plays an increasing role in the evaluation of neuromuscular disease progression and treatment monitoring. The separation of different muscles is essential to evaluate intermuscular differences and variances. Here we have compared three methods to assess diffusion metrics of thigh muscles and showed, that tractography shows less variance in diffusion metrics than parameter maps. For the observed parameters FA, MD, RD and λ1 we found significant main effects of muscle, when using tractography, which was not found with manual annotation using ROI assessment of the parameter maps.
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