Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING
Volume 28, Issue 3, Pages 348-360Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/TMI.2008.2004403
Keywords
Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI); fluid mechanics; tractography; white matter
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health (NIH) [U54 RR021813, U54 EB005149, 5 P41 RR013642]
- National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NAMIC)
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We introduce a fluid mechanics based tractography method for estimating the most likely connection paths between points in diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) volumes. We customize the Navier-Stokes equations to include information from the diffusion tensor and simulate an artificial fluid flow through the DTI image volume. We then estimate the most likely connection paths between points in the DTI volume using a metric derived from the fluid velocity vector field. We validate our algorithm using digital DTI phantoms based on a helical shape. Our method segmented the structure of the phantom with less distortion than was produced using implementations of heat-based partial differential equation (PDE) and streamline based methods. In addition, our method was able to successfully segment divergent and crossing fiber geometries, closely following the ideal path through a digital helical phantom in the presence of multiple crossing tracts. To assess the performance of our algorithm on anatomical data, we applied our method to DTI volumes from normal human subjects. Our method produced paths that were consistent with both known anatomy and directionally encoded color images of the DTI dataset.
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