Analysis of the pyramidal tract in tumor patients using diffusion tensor imaging.

In this work, we propose to use fiber tracking in order to analyze and quantify the state of the pyramidal tracts in patients affected by tumors. We introduce a framework that includes an automatic method to obtain the fibers involved in the pyramidal tract of any subject, in order to compare robustly fiber bundles affected by tumors with healthy fiber tracts from control subjects and also to quantify the relative state of degeneration between the fiber tracts in the two hemispheres of the same patient. The comparative analyses proposed in our methodology are based on a new set of measures on the pyramidal tract, which take into account intrinsic properties of the fibers involved in the bundle as well as the similarity with the pyramidal tract of a standard healthy subject, modeled as the average of a set of controls.