Automatic facial nerve tractography in patient with vestibular schwannoma

Facial nerve tractography has recently been recognized as a valuable tool for predicting risk before vestibular schwannoma surgery to preserve function. Due to complexity of tissue structure, professional experience is usually required to manually adjust tracking parameters and place exclusion ROIs for optimal tractography. A pipeline for automatic facial nerve tractography will significantly lessen surgeons' workload. Here, we proposed a fiber growing method for adjusting the angle threshold adaptively and removed track outliers. Results show that the proposed method achieves good consistency with the manual method. The pipeline would have great potential for assisting clinic surgeries for vestibular schwannoma.