A Comparison of Methods for Recovering Intra-voxel White Matter Fiber Architecture from Clinical Diffusion Imaging Scans

Abstract

Diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging is widely used to study the structure of the fiber pathways of brain white matter. However, the diffusion tensor cannot capture complex intra-voxel fiber architecture such as fiber crossings. Consequently, a number of methods have been proposed to recover intra-voxel fiber bundle orientations from high angular-resolution diffusion imaging scans, which are optimized to resolve fiber crossings. In this work we study how multi-tensor, spherical deconvolution, analytical QBall and diffusion basis function methods perform under clinical scanning conditions. Our experiments indicate that it is feasible to apply some of these methods in clinical data sets.