Construction of a New Length Feature for Evaluating the Morphological Changes of Brain White Matter Fibers
Based on diffusion tensor imaging(DTI)data,whole brain white matter fibers can be presented in three dimensions.At present,morphological analysis of brain white matter fibers has been used to study the changes of fiber morphology in the development process or pathological conditions.In this study,we proposed a new feature to characterize the length of brain white matter fibers by calculating the euclidean space distance accumulated by points along the fiber,and further explored the stability of the feature from two aspects using 50 samples from the human connectome project(HCP)dataset.First,the influence of white matter fibers reconstructed by different fiber tracking algorithms on the feature.Second,under the same fiber tracking algorithm,the influence of different fiber numbers on the feature.Finally,254 subjects from the HCP dataset were included,and we used the feature to preliminarily explore the influence of gender on the morphology of brain white matter fibers by voxel-based analysis(VBA).Through the calculation of intra-class correlation coefficients(ICC)model,it was found that when the overall lengths of white matter fibers reconstructed by the two fiber tracking algorithms were relatively close,the ICCs of the corresponding feature values in most intracranial voxels were above 0.4.In addition,under the same fiber tracking algorithm,different numbers of white matter fibers had little influence on the feature,and the ICCs corresponding to the feature values of intracranial voxels were concentrated above 0.8.The analysis of the influence of gender on the morphology of white matter fibers in the brain showed that compared with males,the length feature values of brain white matter fibers in females were significantly higher in the thalamus,fornix,middle cerebellar peduncle and pallidum.Males had significantly higher feature values in the right rectus and the right pallidum than females.The length feature of brain white matter fibers proposed in this paper is expected to enrich analysis methods of brain white matter fiber morphology for uses in the studies of brain development and brain related diseases.
brain white matter fiberlength featurestabilitygender difference
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