The majority of radiology studies in neurodegenerative conditions infer group-level imaging traits from group comparisons. While this strategy is helpful to define phenotype-specific imaging signatures for academic use, the meaningful interpretation of single scans of individual subjects is more important in everyday clinical practice. Accordingly, we present a computational method to evaluate individual subject diffusion tensor data to highlight white matter integrity alterations. Fifty white matter tracts were quantitatively evaluated in 132 patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) with respect to normative values from 100 healthy subjects. Fractional anisotropy and radial diffusivity alterations were assessed individually in each patient. The approach was validated against standard tract-based spatial statistics and further scrutinised by the assessment of 78 additional data sets with a blinded diagnosis. Our z-score-based approach readily detected white matter degeneration in individual ALS patients and helped to categorise single subjects with a 'blinded diagnosis' as likely ‘ALS’ or ‘control’. The group-level inferences from the z-score-based approach were analogous to the standard TBSS output maps. The benefit of the z-score-based strategy is that it enables the interpretation of single DTI datasets as well as the comparison of study groups. Outputs can be summarised either visually by highlighting the affected tracts, or, listing the affected tracts in a text file with reference to normative data, making it particularly useful for clinical applications. While individual diffusion data cannot be visually appraised, our approach provides a viable framework for single-subject imaging data interpretation.

大多数神经退行性疾病的放射学研究从组比较中推断出组级成像特征。虽然这种策略有助于定义表型特异性成像特征以供学术使用，但对单个受试者的单次扫描的有意义的解释在日常临床实践中更为重要。因此，我们提出了一种计算方法来评估个体主题扩散张量数据，以突出白质完整性的改变。根据来自 100 名健康受试者的规范值，对 132 名肌萎缩侧索硬化 (ALS) 患者的 50 条白质束进行了定量评估。在每个患者中分别评估了分数各向异性和径向扩散率的改变。该方法根据标准的基于道的空间统计进行了验证，并通过对 78 个额外数据集的评估进行了进一步审查，并进行了盲法诊断。我们的基于z分数的方法很容易检测到个体 ALS 患者的白质变性，并有助于将“盲诊断”的单个受试者分类为可能的“ALS”或“对照”。来自基于z分数的方法的组级推断类似于标准 TBSS 输出映射。z的好处-score-based 策略是它能够解释单个 DTI 数据集以及研究组的比较。可以通过突出显示受影响的束来直观地总结输出，或者参考规范数据在文本文件中列出受影响的束，使其对临床应用特别有用。虽然无法直观地评估个体扩散数据，但我们的方法为单对象成像数据解释提供了可行的框架。