DTI Analysis: Soup to Nuts Playlist

Instead of going through each DTI analysis step individually, I've collated everything into a Youtube playlist down below. Just remember that we are using data from the FSL practical course here, and also remember that suing somebody for giving out bad advice, although it is admittedly an easy way to become fantastically wealthy, won't necessarily make you happier.

In any case, just to briefly go over the rest of the steps: After correcting for magnetic field distortions and eddy currents, tensors are fitted using the dtifit command (or simply going through the FDT menu in the FSL interface). Once this has been done for each subject, a series of TBSS tools are used, each one prefixed by "tbss"; for example, tbss_1_preproc, tbss_2_reg, and so on. (You can find all of these in the $FSLDIR/bin directory, and if you have a good handle on Unix programming, you can inspect the code yourself.) After you have run all of those for your dataset, you set up the appropriate experimental design and contrasts, and use the randomise tool to perform statistics in your tractography mask.

Keep in mind that this is just beginner's material; and that if you were to compare your DTI competence to dating, if would be like you were still in that awkward teenager phase, unable to talk to anybody or make eye contact.

However, much of this material has already been covered in other blogs and online resources, provided by several other highly talented scientists and researchers, and - as much as I constantly fantasize about establishing a monopoly over neuroimaging information - there is no practical way to destroy them all.

Therefore, instead of posting redundant information, I highly recommend checking out an ongoing step-by-step series on TORTOISE by Peter Molfese, which you can compare to your results with FSL, and another blog dedicated to diffusion imaging, diffusion-imaging.com. The latter site covers virtually every piece of diffusion imaging software and pipeline out there, and is a good place to start.