Computing White Matter Fiber Orientations in High Angular Resolution Diffusion-Weighted MRI

Ning Cao, Qi Zhuang, Xuwei Liang, Ruiwang Huang, and Jun Zhang
Laboratory for High Performance Scientific Computing and Computer Simulation
Department of Computer Science
University of Kentucky
773 Anderson Hall
Lexington, KY 40506-0046, USA
IME Research Center, Julich, Germany

Abstract

Diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTI) can resolve white matter fiber orientations within voxels in which the diffusion is characterized by Gaussian diffusion process. High angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) adds the capability of describing the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) profile of voxels that contain kissing, branching and crossing fiber configurations. We present a new method for recovering BiGaussian model from HARDI. This method divides the parameters of biGaussian model into the parameters describing the shape of ADC profile and the parameters defining the orientation of ADC profile. The two types of parameters are recovered in separate steps.

Key words: high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI), apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC), BiGaussian, tractography.

Mathematics Subject Classification:

Download the PDF file ningcao07a.pdf.
Technical Report No. 481-07, Department of Computer Science, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 2007.

This work was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant CCF-0527967, in part by the Kentucky Science and Engineering Foundation under grant KSEF-148-502-06-186, and in part by Alzheimer's Association under grant NIGR-06-25460.