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ABSTRACT

Diffusion Tensor MRI (DT-MRI) provides valuable 3D data describing diffusion characteristics of water molecules in the human brain. From DT-MRI, it is hoped that neuronal fiber connections among cortical regions can be reliably extracted and adequately interpreted. To achieve this goal, several significant challenges persist. In this paper, by means of dynamic programming we have developed a global fiber reconstruction algorithm enabling efficient visualization of neuronal connections queried by both the start and end points on the fly. Besides an inherent ability to handle noisy datasets, our algorithm also naturally addresses situations where neuronal fibers branch or cross each other. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with visualization of neuronal connections among activated brain cortical regions detected by functional MRI (fMRI).

REFERENCES

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• 3: David Weinstein , Gordon Kindlmann , Eric Lundberg, Tensorlines: advection-diffusion based propagation through diffusion tensor fields, Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '99: celebrating ten years, p.249-253, October 1999, San Francisco, California, United States
• 4: Basser, P. J., Pajevic, S., Pierpaoli, C., Duda, J., Aldroubi, A. In vivo fiber tractography using DT-MRI Data. Magn Reson Med, 2000. 44(625--632).
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• 6: Leonid Zhukov , Alan H. Barr, Oriented tensor reconstruction: tracing neural pathways from diffusion tensor MRI, Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '02, October 27-November 01, 2002, Boston, Massachusetts
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• 8: Tuch, D. S., Wiegell, M. R., Reese, T. G., Belliveau, J. W., Wedeen, V. Measuring cortico-corital connectivity matrices with diffusion spectrum imaging. In Proceedings of International Society of Magnetic Resonance. 2001. Glasgow, UK.
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  G. Mathematics of Computing
  G.1 NUMERICAL ANALYSIS
      G.1.6 Optimization
          Subjects: Global optimization

Additional Classification:
  G. Mathematics of Computing
  G.3 PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS

  J. Computer Applications
  J.3 LIFE AND MEDICAL SCIENCES

Keywords:
DT-MRI, conditional probability and Bayes rule, dynamic programming, fMRI, fiber tracking, global optimization, reconstruction