Combined Metabolic and Microstructural Tractometry of the Superior Longitudinal Fasciculus in Healthy Brains: A Proof-of-Concept Study
Abstract
Introduction: The superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF) is a major association fiber bundle implicated in cognition, visuospatial attention, language, and motor control, and its impairment is linked to several neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. This proof-of-concept study was performed with three main objectives in healthy adults. First, to fuse whole brain spectroscopic (WBSI) and diffusion MRI (dMRI) derived parametric maps along the SLF I and II segments to quantify their spatial concordance, second, to evaluate regional metabolite concentrations and microstructural properties along these trajectories and finally, to determine the relationships between the WBSI and dMRI parameters within these segments.
Methods: Ten healthy adults (4F, 6M; mean age 31.4 ± 7.53 years) underwent 3T MRI including multi-shell high angular resolution diffusion imaging and WBSI. After preprocessing and non-linear co-registration, WBSI-derived white matter metabolite maps and neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging (NODDI) / diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) derived parametric maps were spatially aligned and projected along the centroid of reconstructed SLF I and II segments divided into 20 discrete, anatomically contiguous sections.
Results: A strong spatial alignment between WBSI and dMRI imaging modalities was confirmed by mutual information and Pearson’s correlation analyses. Intra-subject repeatability, as assessed from a single participant scanned three times,…
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