Lauren O'Donnell

This educational talk will describe and explain local tractography, a popular class of tractography methods that use diffusion MRI data to reconstruct white matter fiber tracts by making local decisions. These local decisions are choices that are made at each tracking step, such as the choice of the direction in which to take the next step. An overview of local tractography methods will be given, including both deterministic and probabilistic approaches. Benefits and challenges of local tractography methods will be described, along with important clinical and neuroscience research applications of local tractography.

Marco Reisert, Valerij Kiselev, Dmitry Novikov

There are two overarching challenges of clinical diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging: the estimation of long-range structural connectivity, and second, the quantification of tissue properties at the a cellular scale of micrometers. Here we propose a global optimization framework that tries to resolve both challenges for human white matter fibers, by unifying global fiber tractography and intra-voxel mesoscopic modeling. The algorithm is based on a Simulated Annealing approach which simultaneously optimizes diffusion parameters and fiber locations. Additionally, fibers can carry their individual set of diffusion microparameters which allows to link them by their structural relationships.

Robert Smith

A new class of diffusion MRI tractography processing methods is emerging, that involve the integration of ideas from existing "local" and "global" tractography algorithms in order to inherit the benefits of both. In this article, the basic premise behind these methods is explained, the history and details of these methods are provided, and the consequences and importance of these developments is contextualised.