Populational brain models of diffusion tensor imaging for statistical analysis: a complementary information in common space

Abstract

Introduction: The search for human brain templates has been progressing in the past decades and in order to understand disease patterns a need for a standard diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) dataset was raised. For this purposes, some DTI templates were developed which assist group analysis studies. In this study, complementary information to the most commonly used DTI template is proposed in order to offer a patient-specific statistical analysis on diffusion-weighted data. Methods: 131 normal subjects were used to reconstruct a population-averaged template. After image pre processing, reconstruction and diagonalization, the eigenvalues and eigenvectors were used to reconstruct the quantitative DTI maps, namely fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), relative anisotropy (RA), and radial diffusivity (RD). The mean absolute error (MAE) was calculated using a voxel-wise procedure, which informs the global error regarding the mean intensity value for each quantitative map. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.How to cite this article: Senra ACS Fo, Murta LO Jr. Populational brain models of diffusion tensor imaging for statistical analysis: a complementary information in common space. Res Biomed Eng. 2017; 33(3):269-275.