Inter-Subject Clustering of Brain Fibers from Whole-Brain Tractography

This work presents an effective multiple subject clustering method using whole-brain tractography datasets. The method is able to obtain fiber clusters that are representative of the population. The proposed approach first applies a fast intra-subject clustering algorithm on each subject obtaining the cluster centroids for all subjects. Second, it compresses the collection of centroids to a latent space through the encoder of a trained autoencoder. Finally, it uses a modified HDBSCAN with adjusted parameters on the encoded centroids of all subjects to obtain the final inter-subject clusters. The results shows that the proposed method outperforms other clustering strategies, and it is able to retrieve known fascicles in a reasonable execution time, achieving a precision over 87% and F1 score above 86% on a collection of 20 simulated subjects.