Targeted Structural Connectivity Analysis

Hello everyone,

I am trying to conduct a structural connectivity analysis of the auditory pathway. I know that for full-brain structural connectivity, a tractogram is generated using ACT and the GM-WM interface, which is then fed to SIFT2. I assume SIFT2 is the important part because the tractogram is only useful for generating a connectome when it has been assigned weights.

I am wondering how these techniques can be applied for the auditory pathway, which is made of tiny subcortical nuclei that do not seem to be seeded in the GM-WM interface. Because of that, I am not able to simply take the full-brain tractogram and filter for streamlines that go through the nuclei.

To me, this means that I have to seed the nuclei myself, which means I cannot use ACT or SIFT2, because they both rely on seeding a full-brain tractogram.

I haven’t been able to find any structural connectivity analyses similar to this that revealed how they got around this. Does anyone have any suggestions for this? Anything is appreciated.

Happy Holidays!

Rishi

Hi, is anyone able to weigh in on this? @ThijsDhollander @jdtournier @rsmith Thanks!