Diffusion MRI is a non-invasive imaging technique that allows the measurement of water molecular diffusion through tissue in vivo. In this paper, we present a novel statistical model which describes the diffusion-attenuated MR signal by the Laplace transform of a probability distribution over symmetric positive definite matrices. Using this new model, we analytically derive a Rigaut-type asymptotic fractal law for the MR signal decay which has been phenomenologically used before. We also develop an efficient scheme for reconstructing the multiple fiber bundles from the DW-MRI measurements. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data sets are presented to show the robustness and accuracy of the proposed algorithms.
Bing Jian, Baba C. Vemuri, Evren Özarslan, Pa