Abstract
Genetic analysis of diffusion tensor images (DTI) shows great promise in revealing specific genetic variants that affect brain integrity and connectivity. Most genetic studies of DTI analyze voxel-based diffusivity indices in the image space (such as 3D maps of fractional anisotropy) and overlook tract geometry. Here we propose an automated workflow to cluster fibers using a white matter probabilistic atlas and perform genetic analysis on the shape characteristics of fiber tracts. We apply our approach to large study of 4-Tesla high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) data from 198 healthy, young adult twins (age: 20-30). Illustrative results show heritability for the shapes of several major tracts, as color-coded maps.
This study was supported by Grant RO1 HD050735 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Grant 496682 from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Australia.
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Jin, Y. et al. (2011). Heritability of White Matter Fiber Tract Shapes: A HARDI Study of 198 Twins. In: Liu, T., Shen, D., Ibanez, L., Tao, X. (eds) Multimodal Brain Image Analysis. MBIA 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7012. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24446-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24446-9_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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