FIBER TRACKING IN TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY: COMPARISON OF 7 TRACTOGRAPHY ALGORITHMS

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the leading cause of death and disability in children. Among the many neurological disruptions that follow an injury, damage to the white matter is among the most common and long-lasting. Diffusion weighted imaging methods are uniquely sensitive to this disruption. Even so, traumatic injury disrupts the brain anatomy we aim to study, complicating the analysis of brain integrity and connectivity, which are typically analyzed using tractography methods optimized for analyzing normal healthy brains. To understand which fiber tracking methods show promise for analysis of TBI, we tested 7 different tractography algorithms for their accuracy and ability to detect group differences between children with TBI and matched controls. We also tested which elements (corresponding to neural bundles) in the resulting connectivity matrices provided the most useful information for accurately detecting group differences.