DCP: a pipeline toolbox for diffusion connectome

The brain structure network constructed by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) reflects the anatomical connections between brain regions, so the brain structure network can quantitatively describes the anatomical connectivity pattern of the entire brain. The structure network based diffusion tensor imaging is widely used in scientific research. While a number of post processing packages have been developed, fully automated processing of DTI datasets on Windows Operating System remains challenging. Here, we developed a MATLAB toolbox named “Diffusion Connectome Pipeline” (DCP) for fully automated constructing brain structure network. The processing modules of a few developed packages, including Diffusion Toolkit, DiffusionKit, SPM and MRIcron, were employed in DCP. Using any number of raw DTI datasets from different subjects, in either DICOM or NIfTI format, DCP can automatically perform a series of steps to construct network. In addition, DCP has a friendly graphical user interface (GUI) running on the Windows Operating System, allowing the user to be interactive and to adjust the input/output settings, as well as the processing parameters. As an open-source package, DCP is freely available at https://www.nitrc.org/projects/dcp . This novel toolbox is expected to substantially simplify the image processing of DTI datasets and facilitate human brain structural connectome studies.