• Marc-Alexandre Côté, Gabriel Girard, Arnaud Boré, Eleftherios Garyfallidis, Jean-Christophe Houde, and Maxime Descoteaux.
• Sherbrooke Connectivity Imaging Laboratory (SCIL), Computer Science Department, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada.
• Med Image Anal. 2013 Oct 1;17(7):844-57.

AbstractWe have developed the Tractometer: an online evaluation and validation system for tractography processing pipelines. One can now evaluate the results of more than 57,000 fiber tracking outputs using different acquisition settings (b-value, averaging), different local estimation techniques (tensor, q-ball, spherical deconvolution) and different tracking parameters (masking, seeding, maximum curvature, step size). At this stage, the system is solely based on a revised FiberCup analysis, but we hope that the community will get involved and provide us with new phantoms, new algorithms, third party libraries and new geometrical metrics, to name a few. We believe that the new connectivity analysis and tractography characteristics proposed can highlight limits of the algorithms and contribute in solving open questions in fiber tracking: from raw data to connectivity analysis. Overall, we show that (i) averaging improves quality of tractography, (ii) sharp angular ODF profiles helps tractography, (iii) seeding and multi-seeding has a large impact on tractography outputs and must be used with care, and (iv) deterministic tractography produces less invalid tracts which leads to better connectivity results than probabilistic tractography.Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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