Multidimensional analysis and detection of informative features in human brain white matter
Fig 1
(a) Whole brain tractography generates streamlines approximating the trajectories of white matter connections. (b) Tractometry classifies these streamlines into anatomical bundles. In this case, we show the left corticospinal tract (CSTL) and the left arcuate fasciculus (ARCL) over a mid-saggital anatomical slice. Tract profiling further extracts bundle profiles, quantifications of various diffusion metrics along the length of the fiber bundle. Here, we show one subject’s fractional anisotropy (FA) profile for (c) the CSTL and (d) the ARCL. (e) the phenotypical target data and tract profile features can be organized into a linear model, . The feature matrix X is color-coded to reveal a natural group structure: the left (orange) group contains k features from the CSTL, the middle (green) group contains k features from the left cingulum cingulate (CGCL), and the right (blue) group contains k features from the ARCL. The coefficients in
follow the same natural grouping. Panels (a) and (b) are adapted from https://figshare.com/articles/figure/example_tractography-segmentation/14485350, and reproduced under the CC-BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).