Neighborhood resolved fiber orientation distributions (NRFOD) in automatic labeling of white matter fiber pathways.

•A novel descriptive fiber representation based on Neighborhood Resolved Fiber Orientation Distributions (NRFOD) along the fibers is proposed.•The proposed fiber representation allows the definition of a translation-invariant fiber-to-fiber distance measure (NRFODD), which is very useful for comparing fibers extracted from different subject spaces.•The new fiber representation and distance measure are used in an automatic fiber clustering framework that combines ROI-based and similarity-based approaches.•The proposed fiber clustering method is validated on brainstem fibers but is generalizable to other fibers in the brain.