{"ID":2895459,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10601","arxiv_id":"2507.10601","title":"AGFS-Tractometry: A Novel Atlas-Guided Fine-Scale Tractometry Approach for Enhanced Along-Tract Group Statistical Comparison Using Diffusion MRI Tractography","abstract":"Diffusion MRI (dMRI) tractography is currently the only method for in vivo mapping of the brain's white matter (WM) connections. Tractometry is an advanced tractography analysis technique for along-tract profiling to investigate the morphology and microstructural properties along the fiber tracts. Tractometry has become an essential tool for studying local along-tract differences between different populations (e.g., health vs disease). In this study, we propose a novel atlas-guided fine-scale tractometry method, namely AGFS-Tractometry, that leverages tract spatial information and permutation testing to enhance the along-tract statistical analysis between populations. There are two major contributions in AGFS-Tractometry. First, we create a novel atlas-guided tract profiling template that enables consistent, fine-scale, along-tract parcellation of subject-specific fiber tracts. Second, we propose a novel nonparametric permutation testing group comparison method to enable simultaneous analysis across all along-tract parcels while correcting for multiple comparisons. We perform experimental evaluations on synthetic datasets with known group differences and in vivo real data. We compare AGFS-Tractometry with two state-of-the-art tractometry methods, including Automated Fiber-tract Quantification (AFQ) and BUndle ANalytics (BUAN). Our results show that the proposed AGFS-Tractometry obtains enhanced sensitivity and specificity in detecting local WM differences. In the real data analysis experiments, AGFS-Tractometry can identify more regions with significant differences, which are anatomically consistent with the existing literature. Overall, these demonstrate the ability of AGFS-Tractometry to detect subtle or spatially localized WM group-level differences. The created tract profiling template and related code are available at: https://github.com/ZhengRuixi/AGFS-Tractometry.git.","short_abstract":"Diffusion MRI (dMRI) tractography is currently the only method for in vivo mapping of the brain's white matter (WM) connections. Tractometry is an advanced tractography analysis technique for along-tract profiling to investigate the morphology and microstructural properties along the fiber tracts. Tractometry has becom...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10601","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10601v2","authors":"[\"Ruixi Zheng\",\"Wei Zhang\",\"Yijie Li\",\"Xi Zhu\",\"Zhou Lan\",\"Jarrett Rushmore\",\"Yogesh Rathi\",\"Nikos Makris\",\"Lauren J. O'Donnell\",\"Fan Zhang\"]","published":"2025-07-12T15:48:02Z","proceeding":"q-bio.QM","tasks":"[\"q-bio.QM\",\"cs.CV\",\"cs.LG\",\"eess.IV\",\"stat.ME\"]","methods":"[\"Diffusion Model\"]","has_code":false,"code_links":[{"ID":612196,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_id":2895459,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10601","paper_title":"AGFS-Tractometry: A Novel Atlas-Guided Fine-Scale Tractometry Approach for Enhanced Along-Tract Group Statistical Comparison Using Diffusion MRI Tractography","repo_url":"https://github.com/ZhengRuixi/AGFS-Tractometry.git","is_official":false,"mentioned_in_paper":false,"mentioned_in_github":true,"github_stars":0}]}