TRX: A community-oriented file format for tractography

Welcome to the documentation of the TRX file format (pronounced “tee-ar-ex” or “tracks”). The goal of TRX is to support use of computational tractography by providing a simple, computationally-efficient and extensible standard. It is designed to be future-proof, with very large datasets and high-resolution acqusitions in mind. It is designed to provide a minimal container for simple applications, as well as to support sophisticated data analysis workflows.

We believe that TRX will serve the tractography research community and the growing computational needs of our field well into the future.

Note

Join us! We are currently working to integrate TRX within the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) ecosystem [Gorgolewski et al., 2016]. We would appreciate suggestions and comments from members of the community.

TRX fundamentals

• Core Concepts
  • The TRX format
  • Example structure
  • Example code

Examples and software support

• Showcase and Example Usage
• Software that supports TRX

Benchmarks

• Multi-Language Benchmarks and Interoperability
  • Dataset and File Sizes
  • Benchmark Results
  • Testing Methodology
  • Technical Observations
  • Availability

Motivation design and history

• Why TRX?
  • Motivation
  • Limitations of existing formats
  • Design goals
  • Streamline storage trade-offs
  • Metadata hierarchy
  • Spatial coordinates
  • Compression
• Timeline of TRX
  • Origins
  • Community adoption and dissemination

• Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Development of TRX was supported by NIMH grant 1R01MH126699, and by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Discovery Grants Program – Individual, grant RGPIN-2023-04179.