Estimating Crossing Fibers: A Tensor Decomposition Approach

Diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging is a unique tool for non-invasive investigation of major nerve fiber tracts. Since the popular diffusion tensor (DT-MRI) model is limited to voxels with a single fiber direction, a number of high angular resolution techniques have been proposed to provide information about more diverse fiber distributions. Two such approaches are Q-Ball imaging and spherical deconvolution, which produce orientation distribution functions (ODFs) on the sphere. For analysis and visualization, the maxima of these functions have been used as principal directions, even though the results are known to be biased in case of crossing fiber tracts. In this paper, we present a more reliable technique for extracting discrete orientations from continuous ODFs, which is based on decomposing their higher-order tensor representation into an isotropic component, several rank-1 terms, and a small residual. Comparing to ground truth in synthetic data shows that the novel meth...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: VIS
• Authors: Thomas Schultz, Hans-Peter Seidel
• Keywords: IEEE Visualization, Nerve Fiber Tracts, Plausible Fiber Tracking, Spherical Deconvolution Data, VIS 2008, Visualization