Utilizing the TractSeg Tool for Automatic Corticospinal Tract Segmentation in Patients With Brain Pathology

Purpose: White-matter tract segmentation in patients with brain pathology can guide surgical planning and can be used for tissue integrity assessment. Recently, TractSeg was proposed for automatic tract segmentation in healthy subjects. The aim of this study was to assess the use of TractSeg for corticospinal-tract (CST) segmentation in a large cohort of patients with brain pathology and to evaluate its consistency in repeated measurements. Methods: A total of 649 diffusion-tensor-imaging scans were included, of them: 625 patients and 24 scans from 12 healthy controls (scanned twice for consistency assessment). Manual CST labeling was performed in all cases, and by 2 raters for the healthy subjects. Segmentation results were evaluated based on the Dice score. In order to evaluate consistency in repeated measurements, volume, Fractional Anisotropy (FA), and Mean Diffusivity (MD) values were extracted and correlated for the manual versus automatic methods. Results: For the automatic CST segmentation Dice scores of 0.63 and 0.64 for the training and testing datasets were obtained. Higher consistency between measurements was detected for the automatic segmentation, with between measurements correlations of volume = 0.92/0.65, MD = 0.94/0.75 for the automatic versus manual segmentation. Conclusions: The TractSeg method enables automatic CST segmentation in patients with brain pathology. Superior measurements consistency was detected for the automatic in comparison to manual fiber segmentation, which indicates an advantage when using this method for clinical and longitudinal studies.