Bottleneck regions of the brain, or areas where multiple white matter pathways of the brain converge and subsequently diverge, present a challenge to anatomically accurate fiber tractography of the brain. In this work, we investigated the prevalence and locations of bottleneck regions. Our results indicate that most white matter contains multiple overlapping and crossing bundles. Moreover, individual orientations withina voxel are associated with multiple bundles, which represent bottlenecks. These findings have profound implications for tractography algorithms which aim to map unknown connections across the brain, and strengthen the awareness of limitations or challenges facing these image processing techniques.
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