Noise-Reduced TPS Interpolation of Primary Vector Fields for Fiber Tracking in Human Cardiac DT-MRI

Abstract

Denoising and interpolation of primary vector fields in DT-MRI are essential for tracking myocardial fibers of the human heart. In this paper, a noise-reduced interpolation method for 3-D primary vector fields in human cardiac DT-MRI is proposed. The method consists of first localizing the noise-corrupted vectors using local statistical properties of the vector fields, then restoring the noise-corrupted vectors by means of Thin Plate Spline (TPS) interpolation method, and finally applying a global TPS interpolation to gain higher resolution in the spatial domain. Experiments and results show that the proposed method allows us to obtain higher resolution and reduce noise, while improving direction-coherence (DC ) of vector fields, preserving details, and improving fiber tracking.