AUTHOR=Rheault Francois , Houde Jean-Christophe , Descoteaux Maxime 

TITLE=Visualization, Interaction and Tractometry: Dealing with Millions of Streamlines from Diffusion MRI Tractography

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroinformatics

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2017

YEAR=2017

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroinformatics/articles/10.3389/fninf.2017.00042

DOI=10.3389/fninf.2017.00042

ISSN=1662-5196

ABSTRACT=Recently proposed tractography and connectomics approaches often require a very large number of streamlines, in the order of millions. Generating, storing and interacting with these datasets is currently quite difficult, since they require a lot of space in memory and processing time. Compression is a common approach to reduce data size, a recent method has been proposed consisting in removing collinear points in the streamlines. Removing points from streamlines results in files that cannot be robustly post-processed and interacted with with existing tools, which are for the most part point-based. The aim of this work is to improve visualization, interaction and tractometry algorithms to robustly handle compressed tractography datasets.  Our proposed improvements are threefold: i) An efficient loading procedure to improve visualization (reduce memomry usage up to 95% for a 0.2 mm step size); ii) interaction techniques robust to compressed tractograms; iii) tractometry techniques robust to compressed tractograms to eliminate biased in tract-based statistics. The present work demonstrates the need of correctly handling compressed streamlines to avoid biases in future tractometry and connectomics studies.