Mapping the aggregate g-ratio of white matter tracts using multi-modal MRI

Abstract

The g-ratio of a myelinated axon is defined as the ratio of the inner-to-outer diameter of the myelin sheath and modulates conduction speed of action potentials along axons. This g-ratio can be mapped in vivo at the macroscopic scale across the entire human brain using multi-modal MRI and sampled along white matter streamlines reconstructed from diffusion-weighted images to derive the g-ratio of a white matter tract. This tractometry approach has shown spatiotemporal variations in myelin g-ratio across white matter tracts and networks. However, tractometry is biased by partial volume effects where voxels contain multiple fiber populations. To address this limitation, we used the Convex Optimization Modeling for Microstructure-Informed Tractography (COMMIT) framework to derive tract-specific axonal and myelin volumes, which are used to compute the tract-specific aggregate g-ratio. We compare our novel COMMIT-based tract-specific g-ratio mapping approach to conventional tractometry in a group of 10 healthy adults. Our findings demonstrate that the tract-specific g-ratio mapping approach preserves the overall spatial distribution observed in tractometry and enhances contrast between tracts. Additionally, our scan-rescan data shows high repeatability for medium to large caliber tracts. We show that short and large caliber tracts have a lower g-ratio, whereas tractometry results show the opposite trends. This technique advances tract-specific analysis by reducing biases introduced by the complex network of crossing white matter fibers.