A comparison of DTI pre-processing tools on a dataset of chronic subcortical stroke rehabilitation patients
In this paper, we compared the performance of a number of Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) pre-processing tools on a dataset of chronic subcortical stroke patients during rehabilitation exercise. In the comparison, acquired Diffusion-Weighted Images (DWI) are pre-processed by different pipelines, which compose of different DTI pre-processing tools, independently. And a DTI measure, FA (fractional anisotropy), is derived from each processed image. Then, a group-based DTI tractography analysis tool, Tract-Based Spatial Statistics (TBSS), is used to localize brain changes in white matter that correlate to the behavior changes during stroke rehabilitation. Although the ground-truth of the dataset is unavailable, it can be observed that there exist significant variations in the obtained hot spot maps that come with different DTI pre-processing pipelines. It suggests that the imaging technicians and scientists should choose the tools carefully according to the acquisition methods and parameters.