AUTHOR=Garyfallidis Eleftherios , Brett Matthew , Correia Marta M., Williams Guy B., Nimmo-Smith Ian TITLE=QuickBundles, a Method for Tractography Simplification JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience VOLUME=6 YEAR=2012 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2012.00175 DOI=10.3389/fnins.2012.00175 ISSN=1662-453X ABSTRACT=

Diffusion MR data sets produce large numbers of streamlines which are hard to visualize, interact with, and interpret in a clinically acceptable time scale, despite numerous proposed approaches. As a solution we present a simple, compact, tailor-made clustering algorithm, QuickBundles (QB), that overcomes the complexity of these large data sets and provides informative clusters in seconds. Each QB cluster can be represented by a single centroid streamline; collectively these centroid streamlines can be taken as an effective representation of the tractography. We provide a number of tests to show how the QB reduction has good consistency and robustness. We show how the QB reduction can help in the search for similarities across several subjects.