DTI registration in atlas based fiber analysis of infantile Krabbe disease.

[krabbe disease]

In recent years , diffusion tensor imaging (DTI ) has become the modality of choice to investigate white matter pathology in the developing brain . To study neonate Krabbe disease with DTI , we evaluate the performance of linear and non-linear DTI registration algorithms for atlas based fiber tract analysis . The DTI scans of 10 age-matched neonates with infantile Krabbe disease are mapped into an atlas for the analysis of major fiber tracts - the genu and splenium of the corpus callosum , the internal capsules tracts and the uncinate fasciculi . The neonate atlas is based on 377 healthy control subjects , generated using an unbiased diffeomorphic atlas building method . To evaluate the performance of one linear and seven nonlinear commonly used registration algorithms for DTI we propose the use of two novel evaluation metrics : a regional matching quality criterion incorporating the local tensor orientation similarity , and a fiber property profile based metric using normative correlation . Our experimental results indicate that the whole tensor based registration method within the DTI -ToolKit (DTI -TK ) shows the best performance for our application .