Mesoskopic Tracking of White Matter Fibers in the Human Brain

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Fibre tracking or tractography is a method for the reconstruction of neuronal pathways in vivo using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging. Its high potential in neuroscience is currently limited by the complexity of data processing. The tracking results are often inaccurate, lack quantification and comparison methods. The aim of this project is to develop quantitative tractography methods in order to enable comparison of results, especially with the invasive techniques for the sake of verification. The recently created Gibbs tracking is considered as the core method of this project. This algorithm already yields results that are promising from the neurological perspective. As the first task of this project, it is to be accelerated by about two orders of magnitude in order to become practically usable. In this method, the fascicles are represented as a set of threedimensional curves. Comparison of such results is a general problem that is to be solved using methods of pattern recognition developed in computer science. Further, the probability of connection mediated by reconstructed fibre bundles is to be quantified using methods of path integration in physics. This methodology also suggests an equivalence between the Gibbs tracking and the widely used probability tracking. This equivalence when established would enable a calibration of connectivity maps in terms of absolute connection probability. All results should be implemented in software and made available for applications in the scientific community.