Image Processing for Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging

This paper1 describes image processing techniques for Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance. In Diffusion Tensor MRI, a tensor describing local water diffusion is acquired for each voxel. The geometric nature of the diffusion tensors can quantitatively characterize the local structure in tissues such as bone, muscles, and white matter of the brain. The close relationship between local image structure and apparent diffusion makes this image modality very interesting for medical image analysis. We present a decomposition of the diffusion tensor based on its symmetry properties resulting in useful measures describing the geometry of the diffusion ellipsoid. A simple anisotropy measure follows naturally from this analysis. We describe how the geometry, or shape, of the tensor can be visualized using a coloring scheme based on the derived shape measures. We show how filtering of the tensor data of a human brain can provide a description of macrostructural diffusion which can be used for meas...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: MICCAI
• Authors: Carl-Fredrik Westin, S. E. Maier, B. Khidhir, Peter Everett, Ferenc A. Jolesz, Ron Kikinis
• Keywords: Diffusion Tensor, Diffusion Tensor Mri, Local Water Diffusion, Medical Imaging, MICCAI 1999