ArticleNeuroImage2021
Diffusion MRI and anatomic tracing in the same brain reveal common failure modes of tractography.
Article in NeuroImage, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 89 citations in OpenAlex.
- Considerations and recommendations from the ISMRM diffusion study group for preclinical diffusion MRI: Part 2-Ex vivo imaging: Added value and acquisition.Magnetic resonance in medicine · 2025Guideline
- White matter variability, cognition, and disorders: a systematic review.Brain structure & function · 2022Pooled it
- Multiscale Heterogeneity of White Matter Morphometry in Psychiatric Disorders.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2026Article
- A human subcortical connectome at 400 μm resolution.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Multi-dimensional diffusion MRI at ultra-high gradient strength for mapping axonal architecture and microstructure in the primate brain.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Anatomical variability of the corticospinal decussation: a diffusion tensor imaging study.Surgical and radiologic anatomy : SRA · 2026Review
- Reconstructing the human brain's wiring diagram from axons up.Trends in neurosciences · 2026Review
- High Resolution Postmortem MRI Discovers Developing Structural Connectivity in the Human Ascending Arousal Network.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Structure-function coupling in the first month of life: Associations with age and attention.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Considerations and recommendations from the ISMRM Diffusion Study Group for preclinical diffusion MRI: Part 3-Ex vivo imaging: Data processing, comparisons with microscopy, and tractography.Magnetic resonance in medicine · 2025Review
- Considerations and recommendations from the ISMRM diffusion study group for preclinical diffusion MRI: Part 1: In vivo small-animal imaging.Magnetic resonance in medicine · 2025Review
- Cross-species neuroanatomy in primates using tractography.Brain structure & function · 2025Review
- The inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus: bridging phylogeny, ontogeny and functional anatomy.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2025Review
- Involvement of the Cerebellar Peduncles inInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- The spatial extent of anatomical connections within the thalamus varies across the cortical hierarchy in humans and macaques.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Self-supervised segmentation and characterization of fiber bundles in anatomic tracing data.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Interplay between MRI-based axon diameter and myelination estimates in macaque and human brain.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Function-guided differences of arcuate fascicle and inferior fronto-occipital fascicle tractography as diagnostic indicators for surgical risk stratification.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- Democratizing technologies in psychiatry: non-human primate neuroanatomy paves the way for accessible neurofeedback in the wild.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Article
- Translation of monosynaptic circuits underlying amygdala fMRI neurofeedback training.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Anatomic tracing is recognized as a critical source of knowledge on brain circuitry that can be used to assess the accuracy of diffusion MRI (dMRI) tractography. However, most prior studies that have performed such assessments have used dMRI and tracer data from different brains and/or have been limited in the scope of dMRI analysis methods allowed by the data. In this work, we perform a quantitative, voxel-wise comparison of dMRI tractography and anatomic tracing data in the same macaque brain. An ex vivo dMRI acquisition with high angular resolution and high maximum b-value allows us to compare a range of q-space sampling, orientation reconstruction, and tractography strategies. The availability of tracing in the same brain allows us to localize the sources of tractography errors and to identify axonal configurations that lead to such errors consistently, across dMRI acquisition and analysis strategies. We find that these common failure modes involve geometries such as branching or turning, which cannot be modeled well by crossing fibers. We also find that the default thresholds that are commonly used in tractography correspond to rather conservative, low-sensitivity operating points. While deterministic tractography tends to have higher sensitivity than probabilistic tractography in that very conservative threshold regime, the latter outperforms the former as the threshold is relaxed to avoid missing true anatomical connections. On the other hand, the q-space sampling scheme and maximum b-value have less of an impact on accuracy. Finally, using scans from a set of additional macaque brains, we show that there is enough inter-individual variability to warrant caution when dMRI and tracer data come from different animals, as is often the case in the tractography validation literature. Taken together, our results provide insights on the limitations of current tractography methods and on the critical role that anatomic tracing can play in identifying potential avenues for improvement.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.