Brain tumours resection & connectivity

1

Dear MRtrix experts,

I hope you are well.

I am working on a project that aims to assess the impact of tumour resection on brain connectivity. Specifically, I want to investigate how increasing a tumour resection area would increase the risk of damaging certain brain connections.

Thus, I was planning to perform whole-brain tractography followed by selection of tracts emerging from the tumor region-of-interest (ROI), while varying the segmented tumour area. Is this a good approach, or do you recommend ROI-based tractography instead?

Thanks for the help provided with my query.

Carla

1 Like
2

Hi Carla,

The way I see it, there is some value in going for the whole-brain tractography. The experimental structure makes more sense to me, as you can use a single tractogram and just progressively change the size of the simulated resection, selecting streamlines accordingly rather than having to re-generate them each time. This also means that at each iteration you can see the streamlines not affected just as you can see the ones affected. Finally, it would mean that methods such as SIFT(2) would be applicable if desired.

Cheers
Rob