IEEE transactions on medical imaging
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IEEE Trans Med Imaging · Nov 2007
High-dimensional spatial normalization of diffusion tensor images improves the detection of white matter differences: an example study using amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Spatial normalization of diffusion tensor images plays a key role in voxel-based analysis of white matter (WM) group differences. Currently, it has been achieved using low-dimensional registration methods in the large majority of clinical studies. This paper aims to motivate the use of high-dimensional normalization approaches by generating evidence of their impact on the findings of such studies. ⋯ Each method was assessed in terms of its ability to detect significant differences between ALS patients and controls. Our findings suggest that inadequate normalization with low-dimensional approaches can result in insufficient removal of shape differences which in turn can confound FA differences in a complex manner, and that utilizing high-dimensional normalization can both significantly minimize the confounding effect of shape differences to FA differences and provide a more complete description of WM differences in terms of both size and tissue architecture differences. We also found that high-dimensional approaches, by leveraging full tensor features instead of tensor-derived indices, can further improve the alignment of WM tracts.
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IEEE Trans Med Imaging · Nov 2007
A fuzzy, nonparametric segmentation framework for DTI and MRI analysis: with applications to DTI-tract extraction.
This paper presents a novel fuzzy-segmentation method for diffusion tensor (DT) and magnetic resonance (MR) images. Typical fuzzy-segmentation schemes, e.g., those based on fuzzy C means (FCM), incorporate Gaussian class models that are inherently biased towards ellipsoidal clusters characterized by a mean element and a covariance matrix. Tensors in fiber bundles, however, inherently lie on specific manifolds in Riemannian spaces. ⋯ Typical tractography methods for tract delineation, incorporating thresholds on fractional anisotropy and fiber curvature to terminate tracking, can face serious problems arising from partial voluming and noise. For these reasons, tractography often fails to extract thin tracts with sharp changes in orientation, such as the cingulum. The results demonstrate that the proposed method extracts this structure significantly more accurately as compared to tractography.
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IEEE Trans Med Imaging · Nov 2007
A probabilistic model-based approach to consistent white matter tract segmentation.
Since the invention of diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI), currently the only established method for studying white matter connectivity in a clinical environment, there has been a great deal of interest in the effects of various pathologies on the connectivity of the brain. As methods for in vivo tractography have been developed, it has become possible to track and segment specific white matter structures of interest for particular study. ⋯ In this work we take a different approach, developing a formal probabilistic model for the relationships between comparable tracts in different scans, and then using it to choose a tract, a posteriori, which best matches a predefined reference tract for the structure of interest. We demonstrate that this method is able to significantly improve segmentation consistency without directly constraining the tractography algorithm.
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IEEE Trans Med Imaging · Nov 2007
Impact of an improved combination of signals from array coils in diffusion tensor imaging.
An improved method for the combination of signals from array coils is presented as a way to reduce the influence of the noise floor on the estimation of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) parameters. By an optimized combination of signals from the array channels and complex averaging of measurements, this method leads to a significant reduction of the noise bias. ⋯ In many applications, the use of this combination method would result in a scan time reduction in comparison to the current standard. The effects of the improved combination on diffusion decay curves, fractional anisotropy maps, and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) profiles are demonstrated.
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IEEE Trans Med Imaging · Sep 2007
Feature-preserving MRI denoising: a nonparametric empirical Bayes approach.
This paper presents a novel method for Bayesian denoising of magnetic resonance (MR) images that bootstraps itself by inferring the prior, i.e., the uncorrupted-image statistics, from the corrupted input data and the knowledge of the Rician noise model. The proposed method relies on principles from empirical Bayes (EB) estimation. It models the prior in a nonparametric Markov random field (MRF) framework and estimates this prior by optimizing an information-theoretic metric using the expectation-maximization algorithm. ⋯ Furthermore, this paper presents a novel Bayesian-inference algorithm on MRFs, namely iterated conditional entropy reduction (ICER). This paper also extends the application of the proposed method for denoising diffusion-weighted MR images. Validation results and quantitative comparisons with the state of the art in MR-image denoising clearly depict the advantages of the proposed method.