DTI-TK Home Page

DTI-TK is a spatial normalization and atlas construction toolkit optimized for examining white matter morphometry using DTI data. A 2011 study published in NeuroImage ranks DTI-TK the top-performing tool in its class.

• open standard-based file IO support: NIfTI format for scalar, vector and tensor image volumes
• tool chains for manipulating tensor image volumes: resampling, smoothing, warping, registration & visualization
• pipelines for WM morphometry: spatial normalization & atlas construction for population-based studies
• built-in cluster-computing support: support for open source Sun Grid Engine (SGE)
• Interoperability with other popular DTI tools: AFNI, Camino, FSL & DTIStudio
• Interoperability with ITK-SNAP: support multi-modal visualization and segmentation

How Much Does it Cost?

DTI-TK is free software, provided under the General Public License. DTI-TK binaries are provided free of charge for academic or non-commercial use. Development and continued maintenance of DTI-TK have been made possible by grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and by the generous time investments from members of the DTI-TK developer community.

Since DTI-TK is free, there's no technical support number to call. We do our best to answer questions on the mailing lists in a timely manner, but we count on other users to offer answers as well. Often, DTI-TK development is done on a volunteer basis. Please keep that in mind when you use DTI-TK.

Who Develops DTI-TK?

DTI-TK has been developed as part of Dr Gary Zhang's Ph.D. thesis at Penn Image Computing and Science Laboratory (PICSL), University of Pennsylvania, under the supervision of Dr James C Gee.

Gary, now at Microstructure Imaging Group of Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC) and Department of Computer Science, University College London, and Dr Paul Yushkevich at PICSL now help maintain and develop DTI-TK.

Who uses DTI-TK?

There are a growing number of researcher groups that have adopted DTI-TK, including several top research groups in diffusion imaging, such as Dr Carlo Pierpaoli's group at NIH and Dr Andrew Alexander's group at University of Wisconsin at Madison. To find out who is publishing with DTI-TK, check out the list of publications used DTI-TK, which we update regularly.

What Can DTI-TK do for Me?

DTI-TK is a very convenient tool that allows you to register, analyze and visualize DTI images very easily. If you know how to use very simple unix command lines, then using DTI-TK is very easy!

What can't DTI-TK do for Me?

DTI-TK does not replicate the core functionalities of many existing popular DTI packages, such as CAMINO or DTIStudio but is designed to allow users of these existing tools to leverage DTI-TK in a pain-free way. The Interoperability page gives detailed descriptions of how DTI-TK enables the seamless integration of DTI-TK with your favorite DTI tool.

What is not supported by DTI-TK?

• tensor reconstruction -constructing diffusion tensor images from raw diffusion-weighted images and related preprocessing support
• Probabilistic fiber tractography

How Can I Contribute?

You can help make DTI-TK better in two ways:

• If you use DTI-TK and report its successes and failures, you will help identify bugs and missing features. Use the 'Bugs' link at the top of this page to report bugs.
• If you are a software developer, you can contribute to DTI-TK as it is an open source application. To become a developer, join us on SourceForge.