High-resolution brain tractography from X-ray phase-contrast images
Abstract
X-ray phase contrast tomography (XPCT) can produce high contrast isotropic images of biological samples in only a few minutes thanks to the unique properties of the synchrotron X-ray beam. XPCT of brain tissue provides an exquisite contrast of white matter, which could be exploited for 3D directional analysis. In this article, we present the first XPCT-based pipeline to perform white matter tractography on rodent brains. We observed the disorganization of white matter in the vicinity of focal demyelinating lesions in the corpus callosum. The ability to obtain an isotropic, high-resolution tractogram is an important landmark which could drive further interest of the neuroscience community toward XPCT.
