Fractional anisotropy‐weighted front evolution algorithm for white matter tractography based on diffusion tensor imaging data |
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Authors: | Fahimeh Darki Mohammad Ali Oghabian Alireza Ahmadian Hamid Soltanian Zadeh Mojtaba Zarei |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran;2. Research Center for Science and Technology in Medicine, RCSTIM, Imam Khomeini Complex Hospital, Tehran, Iran;3. Control and Intelligent Processing Center of Excellence, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran;4. Image Analysis Laboratory, Department of Radiology, Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, MI;5. Center for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, UK |
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Abstract: | Tractography is one of the most important applications of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) which noninvasively reconstructs 3D trajectories of the white matter tracts. Because of the intravoxel orientation heterogeneity of DTI data, some of tractography algorithms are unable to follow the correct pathways after the crossing and branching regions. Front propagation techniques are efficient methods in tracking the crossing fibers. A key parameter influencing the performance of these algorithms is the cost function which is mainly based on the colinearity of tensors' eigenvectors. The effect of the eigenvalues on the anisotropy strength of tensor has not been previously addressed in the definition of the speed function. In this article, a new speed function, based on the effect of diffusion anisotropy and the colinearity of eigenvectors is proposed. The performance of the suggested method on fiber tracking and crossing fiber detection has been evaluated using synthetic datasets, and the feasibility of the proposed method was shown by fiber tracking implemented on real DTI data. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 21, 307–314, 2011 |
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Keywords: | diffusion tensor imaging white matter tractography front propagation fast marching algorithm fractional anisotropy adaptive fractional anisotropy‐weighted speed function fiber crossing |
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