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Abstract #0687

The Effect of Tractography Algorithm on Human Cortical Connectome Reconstruction by Diffusion Weighted MRI

Matteo Bastiani1, 2, Rainer Goebel1, Alard Roebroeck1

1Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands; 2Forschungszentrum Jlich, Jlich, Northreinwestfalen, Germany

This work focuses on reconstructing the macroscopic human cortical connectome using diffusion weighted imaging. This can be represented as a graph where cortical patches are nodes and white-matter connections are edges. The effects on estimating the most common graph measures when using single versus multi direction diffusion models, deterministic versus probabilistic tractography, and local versus global measure-of-fit of the reconstructed fiber trajectories are evaluated. We show that these choices, together with anisotropy, curvature and probabilistic threshold parameters can strongly affect connection density, small-worldness and cortical connection hubs. This is an important consideration for studies using these measures as dependent variables.

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Keywords

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