New paper on connectomics published in Nature communications
© 2017 EPFL
The paper on "The challenge of mapping the human connectome based on diffusion tractography" has been published in Nature Communications. This paper is the result of a large international challenge gathering the main groups active in brain connectivity anaylsis by diffusion MRI. Eight members of the EPFL-LTS5 are among the authors of this important paper.
The challenge of mapping the human connectome based on diffusion tractography
Klaus H. Maier-Hein, Peter F. Neher, Jean-Christophe Houde, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Eleftherios Garyfallidis, Jidan Zhong, Maxime Chamberland, Fang-Cheng Yeh, Ying-Chia Lin, Qing Ji, Wilburn E. Reddick, John O. Glass, David Qixiang Chen, Yuanjing Feng, Chengfeng Gao,YeWu, Jieyan Ma, H. Renjie, Qiang Li, Carl-Fredrik Westin, Samuel Deslauriers-Gauthier, J. Omar Ocegueda González, Michael Paquette, Samuel St-Jean, Gabriel Girard, François Rheault, Jasmeen Sidhu, Chantal M.W. Tax, Fenghua Guo, Hamed Y. Mesri, Szabolcs Dávid, Martijn Froeling, Anneriet M. Heemskerk, Alexander Leemans, Arnaud Boré, Basile Pinsard, Christophe Bedetti, Matthieu Desrosiers, Simona Brambati, Julien Doyon, Alessia Sarica, Roberta Vasta, Antonio Cerasa, Aldo Quattrone, Jason Yeatman, Ali R. Khan, Wes Hodges, Simon Alexander, David Romascano, Muhamed Barakovic, Anna Auría, Oscar Esteban, Alia Lemkaddem, Jean-Philippe Thiran, H. Ertan Cetingul, Benjamin L. Odry, Boris Mailhe, Mariappan S. Nadar, Fabrizio Pizzagalli, Gautam Prasad, Julio E. Villalon-Reina, Justin Galvis, Paul M. Thompson, Francisco De Santiago Requejo, Pedro Luque Laguna, Luis Miguel Lacerda, Rachel Barrett, Flavio Dell’Acqua, Marco Catani, Laurent Petit, Emmanuel Caruyer, Alessandro Daducci, Tim B. Dyrby, Tim Holland-Letz, Claus C. Hilgetag, Bram Stieltjes and Maxime Descoteaux
Abstract: Tractography based on non-invasive diffusion imaging is central to the study of human brain connectivity. To date, the approach has not been systematically validated in ground truth studies. Based on a simulated human brain data set with ground truth tracts, we organized an open international tractography challenge, which resulted in 96 distinct submissions from 20 research groups. Here, we report the encouraging finding that most state-of-the-art algorithms produce tractograms containing 90% of the ground truth bundles (to at least some extent). However, the same tractograms contain many more invalid than valid bundles, and half of these invalid bundles occur systematically across research groups. Taken together, our results demonstrate and confirm fundamental ambiguities inherent in tract reconstruction based on orientation information alone, which need to be considered when interpreting tractography and connectivity results. Our approach provides a novel framework for estimating reliability of tractography and encourages innovation to address its current limitations.