Fiber stippling: An illustrative rendering for probabilistic diffusion tractography

One of the most promising avenues for compiling anatomical brain connectivity data arises from diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI). dMRI provides a rather novel family of medical imaging techniques with broad application in clinical as well as basic neu-roscience as it offers an estimate of the brain´s fiber structure completely non-invasively and in vivo. A convenient way to reconstruct neuronal fiber pathways and to characterize anatomical connectivity from this data is the computation of diffusion tractograms. In this paper, we present a novel and effective method for visualizing probabilistic tractograms within their anatomical context. Our illustrative rendering technique, called fiber stippling, is inspired by visualization standards as found in anatomical textbooks. These illustrations typically show slice-based projections of fiber pathways and are typically hand-drawn. Applying the automatized technique to diffusion tractography, we demonstrate its expressiveness and intuitive usability as well as a more objective way to present white-matter structure in the human brain.