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Running TRACULA

Remember...

For each new terminal that you open, you must do:

setenv SUBJECTS_DIR $TUTORIAL_DATA/diffusion_recons
cd $TUTORIAL_DATA/diffusion_tutorial

If you are at an organized course

Running the commands described bellow will take more time than you have for this tutorial, so please DO NOT RUN these commands right now. All the data has already been processed for you!


There are three steps in the TRACULA processing stream.

The three steps must be run in this order, using the command trac-all.


If you are a Martinos Center user:

Pre-processing

Some pre-processing of the diffusion image data is needed before white-matter pathways can be reconstructed by TRACULA. This pre-processing includes:

All of the above pre-processing steps can be run by passing the -prep command-line option to trac-all as follows:

trac-all -prep -c $TUTORIAL_DATA/diffusion_tutorial/dmrirc.tutorial

The argument of the -c command-line option is the configuration file, where preferences for these pre-processing steps can be specified.

FSL's BedpostX

TRACULA uses the ball-and-stick model of diffusion to reconstruct the pathways from the DWI data. FSL's bedpostX fit the ball-and-stick model to the DWI data, estimating probability distributions of the parameters this model at every voxel. This command will run bedpostX on the pre-processed data of all the subjects specified in the configuration file:

trac-all -bedp -c $TUTORIAL_DATA/diffusion_tutorial/dmrirc.tutorial

Reconstructing White Matter Pathways

The last step is to generate the probability distributions for each white-matter bundles you specified in the configuration file. This is done by simultaneously fitting the shape of each pathway to the results of the ball-and-stick model of diffusion from above and to the prior knowledge of the pathway anatomy given by the set of manually labeled training subjects in the TRACULA atlas. The following command will reconstruct the probabilistic distribution of the pathways:

trac-all -path -c $TUTORIAL_DATA/diffusion_tutorial/dmrirc.tutorial

Now let's look at the results! Click on Next below.

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