Individual variations of the human corticospinal tract and its hand-related motor fibers using diffusion MRI tractography

The corticospinal tract (CST) is one of the most well-studied tracts in human neuroanatomy. Its clinical significance can be demonstrated in many notable traumatic conditions and diseases such as stroke, spinal cord injury (SCI) or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). With the advent of diffusion MRI and tractography the computational representation of the human CST in a 3D model became available. However, the representation of the entire CST and, specifically, the hand motor area has remained elusive. In this paper we proposed a novel method, using manually-drawn ROIs based on robustly identifiable neuroanatomic structures to delineate the entire CST and isolate its hand motor representation as well as to estimate their variability and generate a database of their volume, length and biophysical parameters. Using 37 healthy human subjects we performed a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the CST and the hand-related motor fiber tracts (HMFTs). Finally, we have created variability heatmaps from 37 subjects for both the aforementioned tracts, which could be utilized as reference for clinicians to explore neuropathology in both trauma and disease states.