Fast Streamline Search: An Exact Technique for Diffusion MRI Tractography

• Published in: Neuroinformatics (Totowa, N.J.) Vol. 20; no. 4; pp. 1093 - 1104
• Main Authors: St-Onge, Etienne, Garyfallidis, Eleftherios, Collins, D. Louis
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.10.2022; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Accuracy; Algorithms; Approximation; Bioinformatics; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Brain - diagnostic imaging; Computational Biology/Bioinformatics; Computer Appl. in Life Sciences; Diffusion Tensor Imaging - methods; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted - methods; Magnetic resonance imaging; Neurology; Neurosciences; Original; Original Article; Substantia alba; Time series; White Matter - diagnostic imaging; Polyline; Streamline; Binary search tree; Clustering; White matter bundle; Tractography
• ISSN: 1539-2791; 1559-0089; 1559-0089
• DOI: 10.1007/s12021-022-09590-7

In this work, a hierarchical search algorithm is proposed to efficiently compute the distance between similar tractography streamlines. This hierarchical framework offers an upper bound and a lower bound for the point-wise distance between two streamlines, which guarantees the validity of a proximity search. The proposed streamline representation enables the use of space-partitioning search trees to increase the tractography clustering speed without reducing its accuracy. The resulting approach enables a fast reconstruction a sparse distance matrix between two sets of streamlines, for all similar streamlines within a given radius. Alongside a white matter atlas, this fast streamline search can be used for accurate and reproducible tractogram clustering.