Tractogram foundation model
Diffusion MRI (dMRI) tractography is the only noninvasive approach for mapping white-matter pathways in the living human brain. It represents each brain as a tractogram: a large, unordered set of three-dimensional streamlines that includes information about both local streamline geometry and whole-brain anatomical organization. This structure makes tractograms a natural but challenging target for representation learning. Existing methods treat streamline classification and subject-level prediction as separate problems: streamline classifiers focus on geometric patterns, whereas subject-level prediction often depends on hand-crafted features. As a result, current methods do not learn reusable representations that connect streamline anatomy with whole-brain inter-subject variation. Here we introduce TractFM, a tractogram foundation model that learns reusable representations directly from whole-brain streamline sets. TractFM combines a local streamline encoder with a permutation-equivariant tractogram encoder, allowing all streamlines from a subject to be contextualized jointly in a single forward pass. Pretraining on dense anatomical tract parcellation, i.e., assigning anatomical labels to individual streamlines, yields two complementary representations: contextualized streamline-level embeddings for tract parcellation and compact subject-level descriptors for downstream prediction of subject phenotypes. Across three tractography algorithms and five dMRI datasets, TractFM transfers to both streamline-level and subject-level tasks. Its frozen representations achieve accurate tract parcellation and predict age and sex across independent datasets. These results show that whole-brain geometric context, learned once, can generalize across tractography pipelines, datasets, and prediction tasks.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Representation LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Assessing Streamline Plausibility Through Randomized Iterative Spherical-Deconvolution Informed Tractogram Filtering
Tractography has become an indispensable part of brain connectivity studies. However, it is currently facing problems with reliability. In particular, a substantial amount of nerve fiber reconstructions (streamlines) in …
global-optimizationTractogram filtering of anatomically non-plausible fibers with geometric deep learning
Tractograms are virtual representations of the white matter fibers of the brain. They are of primary interest for tasks like presurgical planning, and investigation of neuroplasticity or brain disorders. Each tractogram …
AnatomyDeep LearningSupervised Tractogram Filtering using Geometric Deep Learning
A tractogram is a virtual representation of the brain white matter. It is composed of millions of virtual fibers, encoded as 3D polylines, which approximate the white matter axonal pathways. To date, tractograms are the …
Deep LearningGPUMerging multiple input descriptors and supervisors in a deep neural network for tractogram filtering
One of the main issues of the current tractography methods is their high false-positive rate. Tractogram filtering is an option to remove false-positive streamlines from tractography data in a post-processing step. In th…
AnatomyClassificationFast and Scalable Optimal Transport for Brain Tractograms
We present a new multiscale algorithm for solving regularized Optimal Transport problems on the GPU, with a linear memory footprint. Relying on Sinkhorn divergences which are convex, smooth and positive definite loss fun…
GPU