Perpendicular fibre tracking for neural fibre bundle analysis using diffusion MRI. (1st January 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ray, S.; O'Dell, W.; Barmpoutis, Angelos
• Is Part Of: International journal of bioinformatics research and applications. Volume 10:Number 1(2014)
• Page Start: 75
• Page End: 92
• Publication Date: 2014-01-01
• Subjects: diffusion-weighted MRI -- diffusion tensor imaging -- fibre tracking -- DTI tractography; Bioinformatics -- Periodicals; 570.285
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1744-5485

Abstract

Information on the directionality and structure of axonal fibres in neural tissue can be obtained by analysing diffusion-weighted MRI data sets. Several fibre tracking algorithms have been presented in the literature that trace the underlying field of principal orientations of water diffusion, which correspond to the local primary eigenvectors of the diffusion tensor field. However, the majority of the existing techniques ignore the secondary and tertiary orientations of diffusion, which contain significant information on the local patterns of diffusion. In this paper, we introduce the idea of perpendicular fibre tracking and present a novel dynamic programming method that traces surfaces, which are locally perpendicular to the axonal fibres. This is achieved by using a cost function, with geometric and fibre orientation constraints, that is evaluated dynamically for every voxel in the image domain starting from a given seed point. The proposed method is tested using synthetic and real DWMRI data sets. The results conclusively demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of our method.