White Matter Tracts

Before practicum on Friday, please complete following:

White Matter Anatomy

• Reading: a review on recent known and unknown about white matter pathways: Bullock DN, Hayday EA, Grier MD, Tang W, Pestilli F, Heilbronner S. A taxonomy of the brain’s white matter: Twenty-one major tracts for the twenty-first century.

• Video: Computational Neuroanatomy at DIPY Workshop

• White matter pathways can be catogorized into commissural, association, and prjection pathways.

  • Commissural pathways: anterior commissure and corpus callosum

  • Projection pathways: acoustic radiation, corticobulbar tract, corticopontine tract (frontal, parietal, and occipital), corticostriatal tract(anterior, superior and posterior), corticospinal tract, dentatorubrothalamic tract, fornix, medial lemniscus, optic radiation, reticulospinal tract, and thalamic radiation (anterior, posterior and superior)

  • Association pathways: arcuate fasciculus, cingulum (frontal parahippocampal, frontal parietal, parahippocampal parietal, parahippocampal, and parolfactory), extreme capsule, frontal aslant, inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus, inferior longitudinal fasciculus, middle longitudinal fasciculus, parietal aslant tract, superior longitudinal fasciculus (I, II and III), uncinate fasciculus, and vertical occipital fasciculus

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During practicum on Friday:

• Introduction to white matter pathways

  • Hands-on (Frank)
    • HCP1065 Group-average template 1mm [download] (details)
    • Tractography atlas [download] (details)
    • Add isosurface from T1W [document]
  • White matter tract anatomy (Linggang)

• Virtual dissection

  • Hands-on (Frank)
    • open HCP1065 Group-average template 1mm in [Step T3]
    • Whole brain fiber tracking & Track dissection [document]

• Automatic Fiber Tracking

  • Hands-on (Linggang)
    • open HCP1065 Group-average template 1mm in [Step T3]
    • Automatic fiber tracking [document]

Assignment: Download FIB file

1. Download 100206.src.gz.gqi.1.7.fib.gz and 100206_T1w.nii.gz

2. Open the FIB file using [Step T3 Fiber Tracking] and click on [Step T3d Tracts][Fiber Tracking] to generate whole brain tracts.

• [Optional] check out document and test different fiber tracking parameters. Observe how changing them leads to different results.

1. Manually segment left arcuate fasciculus, cingulum, uncinate fasciculus, corticospinal tract from whole brain tracks. Compare it with automatic tracking results.

2. Segment left arcuate fasciculus into the acoustic, visual, and lexical encoding part and assign different colors (reference: Giampiccolo D, Duffau H. Controversy over the temporal cortical terminations of the left arcuate fasciculus: a reappraisal. Brain. 2022 Feb 10.)

(Giampiccolo et al. 2022)

(Segmented on HCP1065 tractography atlas)