• Xu Li and Peter C M van Zijl.
• F.M. Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, USA; Department of Radiology, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
• Magn Reson Med. 2014 Sep 1; 72 (3): 610-9.

PurposeAn increasing number of studies show that magnetic susceptibility in white matter fibers is anisotropic and may be described by a tensor. However, the limited head rotation possible for in vivo human studies leads to an ill-conditioned inverse problem in susceptibility tensor imaging (STI). Here we suggest the combined use of limiting the susceptibility anisotropy to white matter and imposing morphology constraints on the mean magnetic susceptibility (MMS) for regularizing the STI inverse problem.MethodsThe proposed MMS regularized STI (MMSR-STI) method was tested using computer simulations and in vivo human data collected at 3T. The fiber orientation estimated from both the STI and MMSR-STI methods was compared to that from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).ResultsComputer simulations show that the MMSR-STI method provides a more accurate estimation of the susceptibility tensor than the conventional STI approach. Similarly, in vivo data show that use of the MMSR-STI method leads to a smaller difference between the fiber orientation estimated from STI and DTI for most selected white matter fibers.ConclusionThe proposed regularization strategy for STI can improve estimation of the susceptibility tensor in white matter.© 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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