Alterations in fiber pathways reveal brain tumor typology: A diffusion tractography study

Conventional structuralMagnetic Resonance (MR) techniques can accurately identify brain tumors but do not provide exhaustive information about the integrity of the surrounding/embedded white matter (WM). In this study, we used Diffusion- Weighted (DW) MRI tractography to explore tumor-induced alterations of WM architecture without any a priori knowledge about the fiber paths under consideration. We used deterministicmulti-fiber tractography to analyze 16 cases of histologically classified brain tumors (meningioma, low-grade glioma, high-grade glioma) to evaluate the integrity of WM bundles in the tumoral region, in relation to the contralateral unaffected hemisphere. Our new tractographic approach yielded measures ofWMinvolvement which were strongly correlated with the histopathological features of the tumor (r = 0.83, p = 0.0001). In particular, the number of affected fiber tracts were significantly (p = 0.0006) different among tumor types. Our method proposes a new application of dif...