Letter of Intent

To participate in the DTI Tractography challenge, please download and fill in the letter of intent for participation, and return it signed to Sonia Pujol (spujol at bwh.harvard.edu). After registration of your team, you will receive the link to access the workshop datasets.

Challenge Datasets

The MICCAI 2014 DTI Challenge datasets will consist of DWI, T1-weighted and T2-weighted anonymized scans acquired on four neurosurgical cases. The data will include pre-segmented tumor and edema region. The neurosurgical datasets will be available for download to the DTI Challenge participants on the XNAT Central website. The cases include neurosurgical data that were acquired in the AMIGO suite.

Clinical Goal

Tractography teams are invited to reconstruct the left and right corticospinal tracts (CST) located in the peritumoral area. The CST starts in the cerebral cortex and terminates in the spinal cord. The tract courses through the posterior limb of the internal capsule, the cerebral peduncle, the ventral pons, the ventral surface of the medulla, and decussates in the lower medulla.

Tractography Methods

Tractography algorithms used by the DTI Challenge teams to reconstruct the clinical tract of interest from the neurosurgical cases can be novel tools or existing methods. There is no restriction on the choice of the algorithm. 

Guidelines

Participants are invited to submit a zip archive file containing their results for the reconstruction of the left and right corticospinal tracts in two neurosurgical cases. The results should be submitted as a zip archive ‘miccai2014DTIChallenge_firstAuthorName.zip’.All results should be in the original DWI image space.

The tractography results should include the following elements:
1) The tracts in the VTK-ASCII file format (vtkPolyData)
2) The egions of interest (ROIs) used for the reconstruction in the ITK-readable Nrrd file format
3) A coronal view of the tracts overlaid on a FA image in png format.

The results should be submitted with the following file naming convention:
– tracts: (patientN_left_tract_LastName.vtk, patientN_right_tract_LastName.vtk)
– regions of interest:(patientN_left_ROI_LastName.vtk, patientN_right_ROI_LastName.vtk)
– coronal view: patientN_coronal_view_LastName.png

Please note that the file size of the submitted tracts must be less than 10 MB.
The paper should include the following elements:
1) a presentation of the DTI analysis pipeline,
2) a description of the tractography technique and parameters used for each clinical case,
3) a series of pictures providing an intuitive way to present the reconstructed tracts to neurosurgeons.

Participants are invited to propose an evaluation criteria for their tractography method in the Appendix of the paper. Supplementary materials such as short videos, are encouraged, but not mandatory.
Papers should be formatted in Lecture Notes in Computer Science style. The file format for submission is Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Other formats will not be accepted. Once you have completed the analysis, upload your workshop paper and results at the location of your choice, and send the URL to access them to spujol at bwh.harvard.edu to receive a confirmation of your submission. File format guidelines for the tractography results can be accommodated. Please contact us with any question on file formats and/or software constraints.