Clustering of tensor votes for inference of fibre orientations in DTI data

• mong the various diffusion MRI techniques, diffusion ten-sor imaging (DTI) is still most commonly used in clinicalpractice in order to investigate connectivity and fibre anatomyin the human brain. Besides its apparent advantages of a shortacquisition time and noise robustness compared to other tech-niques, it suffers from its major weakness of assuming a sin-gle fibre model in each voxel. This constitutes a problem forDTI fibre tracking algorithms in regions with crossing fibres.Methods approaching this problem in a postprocessing stepemploy diffusion-like techniques to correct the directional in-formation. We propose an extension of tensor voting in whichinformation from voxels with a single fibre is used to inferorientation distributions in multi fibre voxels. The method isable to resolve multiple fibre orientations by clustering tensorvotes instead of adding them up. Moreover, a new vote cast-ing procedure is proposed which is appropriate even for smallneighbourhoods. To account for the locality of DTI data, weuse a small neighbourhood for distributing information at atime, but apply the algorithm iteratively to close larger gaps.The method shows promising results in both synthetic casesand for processing DTI-data of the human brain.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Medicinteknik -- Medicinsk bildbehandling (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Medical Engineering -- Medical Image Processing (hsv//eng)

Keyword

DTI

tensor voting

spherical clustering

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)