This year’s ISMRM Annual Meeting was initially scheduled to be held this April in Sydney, Australia. As the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, the conference was first rescheduled to be in August in Paris, France, then later moved to a fully virtually format. While I was sad to miss out on travel to both of those cities, I was happy to once again receive a Magna Cum Laude Merit Award for my talk entitled “Synchrotron microCT tractography connectomics: comparison with diffusion MRI and neural tracer injections.”

In this work, we used public neural tracer data from the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas to show that

1. Fiber orientations extracted from x-ray microCT data can be used with standard tractography pipelines
2. Both diffusion MRI and microCT tractography yield comparable performance to a completely random tracking approach in terms of replicating the true structural connectivity of the mouse brain as measured with the tracer data, indicating severe geometric bias in current tractography methods

You can read my abstract here and watch my presentation below: