ConWhAt - a library for connectome-based white matter atlas analysis.

Conventional approaches to atlasing white matter structures follow a tract-based ontology: they assign locations in stereotaxic space to a relatively small number of gross white matter tracts from the classical neuroanatomy literature.

Problem is, they aren't particularly well-suited to network-based descriptions of brain organization.

Connectome-based white matter atlases take a different approach: they follow a connectivity-based ontology. The idea here is rather than following the classical anatomical tract nomenclature, to label white matter voxels according to the grey matter regions that their constituent fibers interconnect.

The benefit of this approach is that a scientist/clinician/citizen can take a set of (standard space) coordinates, or a nifti-format ROI mask such as a binary lesion map, and straightforwardly query which grey matter region pairs (i.e. connectome-edges) have fibers passing through those locations.