Alignment of Tractography Streamlines using Deformation Transfer via Parallel Transport
This work addresses the challenge of finding direct tract-correspondence in brain imaging for researchers in neuroscience and medical imaging, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing geometric frameworks.
The authors tackled the problem of aligning heterogeneous white matter fiber tracts across individuals by introducing a novel deformation metric that enables simultaneous comparison and registration, achieving bundle alignment on a population of 43 healthy adult subjects.
We present a geometric framework for aligning white matter fiber tracts. By registering fiber tracts between brains, one expects to see overlap of anatomical structures that often provide meaningful comparisons across subjects. However, the geometry of white matter tracts is highly heterogeneous, and finding direct tract-correspondence across multiple individuals remains a challenging problem. We present a novel deformation metric between tracts that allows one to compare tracts while simultaneously obtaining a registration. To accomplish this, fiber tracts are represented by an intrinsic mean along with the deformation fields represented by tangent vectors from the mean. In this setting, one can determine a parallel transport between tracts and then register corresponding tangent vectors. We present the results of bundle alignment on a population of 43 healthy adult subjects.