Microstructural Quantile Profile for White Matter Tracts

Oregon Convention Center 

In vivo fiber tractography is a 3D reconstruction technique to assess neural tracts using data collected by dMRI. The fiber tract obtained from the technique can be used for studying the brain's anatomy and its associations to function of interest covariates. Recent machine learning methods can efficiently identify subject-level white matter tracts. However, analyzing the scalar clinical/psychological factors (e.g., cognitive score) and fiber tracts is difficult. The current methods use high-level summary statistics of fiber tract; thus, the relationship investigation is based on traditional regression models. In this paper, we find the FA quantiles over the points of a fiber tract (Microstructural Quantile Profile) can be used to differentiate the effect of function of interest covariates. We adopted and further developed the quantile regression methodology with clustered data to infer the relationship between Microstructural Quantile Profile and scalar clinical/psychological factors. Insightful spatial findings were provided via our new approach. The method is more robust in identifying the relationship between fiber tract and scalar clinical/psychological factors.

fiber tractography

diffusion MRI

quantile regression

microstructural quantile profile 

Section on Statistics in Imaging