New Approaches to Estimation of White Matter Connectivity in Diffusion Tensor MRI: Elliptic PDEs and Geodesics in a Tensor-Warpe

Abstract. We investigate new approaches to quantifying the white matter connectivity in the brain using Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging data. Our first approach finds a steady-state concentration/heat distribution using the three-dimensional tensor field as diffusion/conductivity tensors. Our second approach casts the problem in a Riemannian framework, deriving from each tensor a local warping of space, and finding geodesic paths in the space. Both approaches use the information from the whole tensor, and can provide numerical measures of connectivity. 1 Background Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DT-MRI) measures the selfdiffusion of water in biological tissue. The utility of this method stems from the fact that tissue structure locally affects the Brownian motion of water molecules. Consequently, a coherent organization of tissue (over scales comparable to that of a voxel) will be reflected in the DT-MRI diffusion measurements. Neural fiber tracts contain para...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: MICCAI
• Authors: Lauren O'Donnell, Steven Haker, Carl-Fredrik Westin
• Keywords: Background Diffusion Tensor, Diffusion Tensor, Diffusion Tensor Field, Medical Imaging, MICCAI 2002