Abstract

Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) is the only technique to probe in vivo and noninvasively the fiber structure of human brain white matter. Detecting the crossing of neuronal fibers remains an exciting challenge with an important impact in tractography. In this work, we tackle this challenging problem and propose an original and efficient technique to extract all crossing fibers from diffusion signals. To this end, we start by estimating, from the dMRI signal, the so-called Cartesian tensor fiber orientation distribution (CT-FOD) function, whose maxima correspond exactly to the orientations of the fibers. The fourth order symmetric positive definite tensor that represents the CT-FOD is then analytically decomposed via the application of a new theoretical approach and this decomposition is used to accurately extract all the fibers orientations. Our proposed high order tensor decomposition based approach is minimal and allows recovering the whole crossing fibers without any a priori information on the total number of fibers. Various experiments performed on noisy synthetic data, on phantom diffusion, data and on human brain data validate our approach and clearly demonstrate that it is efficient, robust to noise and performs favorably in terms of angular resolution and accuracy when compared to some classical and state-of-the-art approaches.

Highlights

  • The diffusion magnetic resonance imaging or Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) [1] is a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) modality which is suited to study and characterize the white matter neuronal architecture of the brain in vivo and noninvasively

  • We propose to find the orientations of the fiber bundles from diffusion signals using an analytical decomposition of symmetric high order tensor; for lightness and clarity of the paper we will use the abbreviation Adecomp-symmetric high order tensors (SHOT) for analytical decomposition of symmetric high order tensor

  • We have proposed an Adecomp-SHOT based approach to extract the fiber directions from diffusion weighted-MRI (DW-MRI) data

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Summary

Introduction

The diffusion magnetic resonance imaging or dMRI [1] is a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) modality which is suited to study and characterize the white matter neuronal architecture of the brain in vivo and noninvasively. To overcome the limitations of the DTI model, new high angular resolution techniques (HARDI) have been proposed, such as the diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI), the Q-ball imaging (QBI) [3, 4], or the symmetric high order tensors (SHOT) [5]. These techniques allow estimating the diffusion orientation distribution function (ODF) whose maxima are aligned with the orientations of the underlying fibers. The ODF and FOD functions are described in spherical harmonics (SH) basis; the angular

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