Director field analysis to explore local white matter geometric structure in diffusion MRI

  • Jian Cheng*
  • , Peter J. Basser
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

In diffusion MRI, a tensor field or a spherical function field, e.g., an Orientation Distribution Function (ODF) field, are estimated from measured diffusion weighted images. In this paper, inspired by microscopic theoretical treatment of phases in liquid crystals, we introduce a novel mathematical framework, called Director Field Analysis (DFA), to study local geometric structural information of white matter from the estimated tensor field or spherical function field. (1)We propose Orientational Order (OO) and Orientational Dispersion (OD) indices to describe the degree of alignment and dispersion of a spherical function in each voxel; (2) We estimate a local orthogonal coordinate frame in each voxel with anisotropic diffusion; (3) Finally, we define three indices to describe three types of orientational distortion (splay, bend, and twist) in a local spatial neighborhood, and a total distortion index to describe distortions of all three types. To our knowledge, this is the first work to quantitatively describe orientational distortion (splay, bend, and twist) in diffusion MRI. The proposed scalar indices are useful to detect local geometric changes of white matter for voxel-based or tract-based analysis in both DTI and HARDI acquisitions.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInformation Processing in Medical Imaging - 25th International Conference, IPMI 2017, Proceedings
EditorsHongtu Zhu, Marc Niethammer, Martin Styner, Hongtu Zhu, Dinggang Shen, Pew-Thian Yap, Stephen Aylward, Ipek Oguz
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages427-439
Number of pages13
ISBN (Print)9783319590493
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event25th International Conference on Information Processing in Medical Imaging, IPMI 2017 - Boone, United States
Duration: 25 Jun 201730 Jun 2017

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume10265 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference25th International Conference on Information Processing in Medical Imaging, IPMI 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoone
Period25/06/1730/06/17

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