A statistical model of the fiber bundles is calculated as the average and standard deviation of a parametric representation of the fiber tracts, using the coefficients of the 3D quintic Bspline representation of the tracts. An atlas of the fiber tracts is constructed by averaging the bundle models over a population with the fiber tracts mapped onto the atlas coordinate. Using the model representation and with the atlas as the prior map, expectation-maximization (EM) is performed to cluster the fiber tracts in a mixture model framework. As an application, the method is applied to cluster the corpus callosum fiber tracts into its subdivisions and to calculate quantitative parameters for each region.
Mahnaz Maddah, W. Eric L. Grimson, Simon K. Warfie