Diffusion tensor sharpening improves white matter tractography

Maxime Descoteaux; Christophe Lenglet; Rachid Deriche

doi:10.1117/12.708988

5 March 2007 Diffusion tensor sharpening improves white matter tractography

Maxime Descoteaux, Christophe Lenglet, Rachid Deriche

Proceedings Volume 6512, Medical Imaging 2007: Image Processing; 65121J (2007) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.708988
Event: Medical Imaging, 2007, San Diego, CA, United States

Abstract

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is currently a widespread technique to infer white matter architecture in the human brain. An important application of DTI is to understand the anatomical coupling between functional cortical regions of the brain. To solve this problem, anisotropy maps are insufficient and fiber tracking methods are used to obtain the main fibers. While the diffusion tensor (DT) is important to obtain anisotropy maps and apparent diffusivity of the underlying tissue, fiber tractography using the full DT may result in diffusive tracking that leaks into unexpected regions. Sharpening is thus of utmost importance to obtain complete and accurate tracts. In the tracking literature, only heuristic methods have been proposed to deal with this problem. We propose a new tensor sharpening transform. Analogously to the general issue with the diffusion and fiberOrientation Distribution Function (ODF) encountered when working with High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI), we show how to transform the diffusion tensors into so-called fiber tensors. We demonstrate that this tensor transform is a natural pre-processing task when one is interested in fiber tracking. It also leads to a dramatic improvement of the tractography results obtained by front propagation techniques on the full diffusion tensor. We compare and validate sharpening and tracking results on synthetic data and on known fiber bundles in the human brain.

Citation Download Citation

Maxime Descoteaux, Christophe Lenglet, and Rachid Deriche "Diffusion tensor sharpening improves white matter tractography", Proc. SPIE 6512, Medical Imaging 2007: Image Processing, 65121J (5 March 2007); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.708988

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE

INSTITUTIONAL
Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.

SELECT YOUR INSTITUTION

PERSONAL
Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.

PERSONAL SIGN IN

No SPIE Account? Create one

PURCHASE THIS CONTENT

SUBSCRIBE TO DIGITAL LIBRARY

50 downloads per 1-year subscription

Members: $195

Non-members: $335 ADD TO CART

25 downloads per 1 - year subscription

Members: $145

Non-members: $250 ADD TO CART

PURCHASE SINGLE ARTICLE

Includes PDF, HTML & Video, when available