Hi all - After a year of lockdown coding, and a couple more years of tireless work by the tract annotation team, we are pleased to share the new version of TRACULA. For a summary of new features see: https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/Tracula#Updates
Of note, new protocols were developed for the manual annotation of 42 tracts, which you can see here: https://dmri.mgh.harvard.edu/tract-atlas/ These tracts were manually annotated on the bmax=10000, 512-direction data from our Connectom scanner and we now use them as training data for TRACULA, allowing it to reconstruct the same tracts automatically in much lower quality (e.g., b=1000, 32- or 64-direction) data. More details in Chiara Maffei's preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.28.450265https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.28.450265v2
The tutorials and documentation have been updated to reflect this new version: https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/Tracula https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/FsTutorial/Tracula
I highly recommend skimming through the tutorial, even if you've used TRACULA in the past. A lot has changed in the configuration options, and there are some additional outputs that you can take advantage of.
What we are missing is a new tutorial dataset that is compatible with this new version. That will have to wait until after our summer vacations 🙂 There is also ongoing work on adding more tracts, and more features to come in the future!
In addition to Chiara and the tract annotation team (https://dmri.mgh.harvard.edu/tract-atlas/#acqknowledge), special thanks to Doug for his help integrating along-tract stats with the FreeSurfer statistical analysis tools, Ruopeng for the new visualization features for these along-tract stats in freeview, and Andrew for his patience with last-minute commit disasters...
I hope everyone is having a great summer!
Anastasia.
| Anastasia Yendiki, Ph.D. | Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School | Associate Investigator, Massachusetts General Hospital | Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging | 149 13th St. Suite 2301 | Charlestown, MA 02129 | Tel: 617-726-9434 | Fax: 617-726-7422 | Web: http://scholar.harvard.edu/a-y