Related Articles Intersubject variability in the analysis of diffusion tensor images at the group level: fractional anisotropy mapping and fiber tracking techniques. Magn Reson Imaging. 2008 Aug 11; Authors: Müller HP, Unrath A, Riecker A, Pinkhardt EH, Ludolph AC, Kassubek J INTRODUCTION: Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) provides comprehensive information about quantitative diffusion and connectivity in the human brain. Transformation into stereotactic standard space is a prerequisite for group studies and requires thorough data processing to preserve directional inter-dependencies. The objective of the present study was to optimize technical approaches for this preservation of quantitative and directional information during spatial normalization in data analyses at the group level. METHODS: Different averaging methods for mean diffusion-weighted images containing DTI information were compared, i.e., region of interest-based fractional anisotropy (FA) mapping, fiber tracking (FT) and corresponding tractwise FA statistics (TFAS). The novel technique of intersubject FT that takes into account directional information of single data sets during the FT process was compared to standard FT techniques. Application of the methods was shown in the comparison of normal subjects and subjects with defined white matter pathology (alterations of the corpus callosum). RESULTS: Fiber tracking was applied to averaged data sets and showed similar results ...
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