Amandola, Matthew; Herlin, Bastien; Kim, Michael E.; Vandekar, Simon; Uszynski, Ivy; Landman, Bennett; Poupon, Cyril; Schilling, Kurt G. (2026).听.听Brain Structure and Function, 231(8), 137.听
Diffusion tractography is an MRI-based technique used to study the brain鈥檚 white-matter pathways, but different analysis methods can produce different representations of these pathways. This study examined whether conclusions about sex-related differences in white matter remain consistent when the same data are analyzed using two different, but equally reasonable, tractography pipelines. Despite methodological differences, the two approaches produced highly consistent findings, particularly for measures of tissue microstructure, with only 1 of 343 comparisons showing a significant disagreement. Differences were more common for measures of pathway volume, partly because the methods varied in their sensitivity to these features. Overall, the results suggest that conclusions about sex-related differences in white matter are generally robust across reasonable tractography methods, supporting the reliability of tractography research.
Fig. 1
Pipeline overview between the whole-brain tractogram method (Method 1) vs. the bundle-specific bundle segmentation method (Method 2)