Tractography–Based Atlas of the Healthy Cortico-Spinal Tract

The corticospinal tract is a critical white matter pathway as it connects the primary motor cortex to the spinal cord and handles voluntary motion. Atlases of major brain connections do exist, but, surprisingly, atlases that depict the actual localisation of a specific pathway are missing.

In this work, we propose a comprehensive statistical methodology for generating an atlas of the healthy CST. This should help designing efficient statistical tests for detecting damaged tissue along the CST and consequently improving patient outcome in a number of brain pathologies (tumors, strokes, Parkinson and related disorders, etc.).