Direct native-space fiber bundle alignment for group comparisons

Let's suppose that we want to study specific fiber bundles in different subjects. The common approach would be to use a voxel-wise analysis like TBSS or VBM which will warp scalar volumes in a common space, e.g. MNI space, and show how every subject differentiates from an average template. However, we know that with averaging and warping much of the specific information about the individual subjects' differences is lost. In this work, we provide a solution to this problem by using local streamline registration of specific bundles from different subjects. We show that with this new method we can keep track of the differences from every subject to every other subject in our group study.