Tractography via the Ensemble Average Propagator in Diffusion MRI

Abstract

It's well known that in diffusion MRI (dMRI), fibre crossing is an important problem for most existing diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) based tractography algorithms. To overcome these limitations, High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI) based tractography has been proposed with a particular emphasis on the the Orientation Distribution Function (ODF). In this paper, we advocate the use of the Ensemble Average Propagator (EAP) instead of the ODF for tractography in dMRI and propose an original and efficient EAP-based tractography algorithm that outperforms the classical ODF-based tractography, in particular, in the regions that contain complex fibre crossing configurations. Various experimental results including synthetic, phantom and real data illustrate the potential of the approach and clearly show that our method is especially efficient to handle regions where fiber bundles are crossing, and still well handle other fiber bundle configurations such as U-shape and kissing fibers.