Transform .tck Files into MNI Space

Good evening MRTrix3 Experts,

I am running CSD probabilistic tractography on the S900 release of the Human Connectome Project dataset. I am trying to convert my .tck files to MNI space, and to do this I followed @eloydelas instructions from 2016, which can be reviewed at this link. My ultimate goal is to do the following:

  1. Transform .tck tractographies to MNI space
  2. Convert tractographies to voxel maps
  3. Average together tractographies for all subjects in a common space to create a spatial histogram/probabilistic map using a function like fslmaths in FSL.
  4. Calculate Dice Coefficients for the resultant map to assess overlap with ROIs from various atlases
  5. Below are examples of subject-space tractographies, and my failed MNI normalization of the same tract:

Subject-Space Tractography:

Failed MNI Normalisation:


My pipleline is delineated as follows:

  1. Create no-warp images in target space:**
warpinit \
    $FSLDIR/data/standard/MNI152_T1_2mm_brain.nii.gz \
     no-warp-[].nii
  1. Warp target images to subject space:
for s in ${subjects}
do
    for n in 0 1 2
    do   
                fnirt \
                      --ref=dtifit_output/DTI_FA.nii.gz \
                      --in=no-warp-${n}.nii \
                      --aff=standard2diff_${s}.mat \
                      --iout=warp-${n}_${s}.nii
     done
done
  1. Perform MNI normalisation on .tck images:
for s in ${subjects}                                                  
do
     tcktransform \
        ifod2_paths.tck \
        warp-[]_${s}.nii \
        ifod2_paths_mni.tck 
done

Please note that I also tried redoing this process perfoming the following intermediary step in FSL:

for s in ${subjects}                                                                                                  
do 
    for n in 0 1 2
    do
        fslorient \
            -copysform2qform \
            warp-${n}_${s}.nii
done

I would sincerely appreciate any advice this community may be able to offer!

Kind regards,
Linda

Hello MRTrix3 Experts,

I wanted to follow up with my last inquiry, to see if anyone might be able to help with these registration issues.

I look forward to seeing your replies!

Kind regards,
Linda

Hello Linda,

I’m a beginner and can not quite sure how to address your issue. However, I’m very interested in what you’re talking about.

Do you think we can prioritize converting tractographies to voxel maps first on Subject-Space by tckmap to get a .nii file? Then transform .nii file to MNI space?

I’m not sure if my idea is correct; I’d like to hear your opinion.

Thanks,
Ricardo

Hi @Ricardo and @ljhoffman ,

You both might find this DIPY tutorial helpful: DIPY — dipy 1.8.0 documentation

Best,
Steven