Reconstructing contralateral fiber tracts: methodological aspects of cerebello-thalamocortical pathway reconstruction

摘要

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, isknown to project numerous axonal bundles to thecerebral 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 (b0). We observed that the reconstruction of the pathways was more anatomically accurate when using ROIs placed on TDI rather than on b0 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.