A software ecosystem for brain tractometry processing, analysis, and insight

Tractometry uses diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) to assess physical properties of brain connections. Here, we present an integrative ecosystem of software that performs all steps of tractometry: post-processing of dMRI data, delineation of major white matter pathways, and modeling of the tissue properties within them. This ecosystem also provides a set of interoperable and extensible tools for visualization and interpretation of the results that extract insights from these measurements. These include novel machine learning and statistical analysis methods adapted to the characteristic structure of tract-based data. We benchmark the performance of these statistical analysis methods in different datasets and analysis tasks, including hypothesis testing on group differences and predictive analysis of subject age. We also demonstrate that computational advances implemented in the software offer orders of magnitude of acceleration. Taken together, these open-source software tools—freely available at https://tractometry.org—provide a transformative environment for the analysis of dMRI data.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  PLoS Comput. Biol.

• Publication date

  2025-08-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013323PMID 40811747PMCID 12373284
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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