Reconstructing contralateral fiber tracts: Methodological aspects of cerebello-thalamo-cortical pathway reconstruction

Fulvia Palesi*, Jacques Donald Tournier, Fernando Calamante, Nils Muhlert, Gloria Castellazzi, Declan Chard, Egidio D’Angelo, Claudia Gandini Wheeler-Kingshott

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

12 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The identification of pathways connecting the cerebral cortex with subcortical structures is critical to understanding how large-scale brain networks operate. The cerebellum, for example, is known to project numerous axonal bundles to the cerebral cortex passing through the thalamus. This paper focuses on the technical details of cerebello-thalamo-cortical pathway reconstruction using advanced diffusion MRI techniques in humans in vivo. Pathways reconstructed using seed/target placement on super-resolution maps, created with track density imaging (TDI), were compared with those reconstructed by defining regions of interest (ROIs) on non-diffusion weighted images (bO). We observed that the reconstruction of the pathways was more anatomically accurate when using ROIs placed on TDI rather than on bO maps, while inter-subject variability and reproducibility were similar between the two methods. Diffusion indices along pathways showed a position-dependent specificity that will need to be taken into consideration in future clinical investigations.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)229-238
Number of pages10
JournalFunctional Neurology
Volume31
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 2016

Keywords

  • Cerebello-thalamo-cortical pathway
  • Constrained spherical deconvolution
  • Diffusion MRI
  • Super-resolution
  • Track-density imaging

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Reconstructing contralateral fiber tracts: Methodological aspects of cerebello-thalamo-cortical pathway reconstruction'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this