Abstract
In Diffusion Weighted Magnetic Resonance Image (DW-MRI) processing a 2nd order tensor has been commonly used to approximate the diffusivity function at each lattice point of the DW-MRI data. It is now well known that this 2nd-order approximation fails to approximate complex local tissue structures, such as fibers crossings. In this paper we employ a 4th order symmetric positive semi-definite (PSD) tensor approximation to represent the diffusivity function and present a novel technique to estimate these tensors from the DW-MRI data guaranteeing the PSD property. There have been several published articles in literature on higher order tensor approximations of the diffusivity function but none of them guarantee the positive semi-definite constraint, which is a fundamental constraint since negative values of the diffusivity coefficients are not meaningful. In our methods, we parameterize the 4th order tensors as a sum of squares of quadratic forms by using the so called Gram matrix method from linear algebra and its relation to the Hilbert’s theorem on ternary quartics. This parametric representation is then used in a nonlinear-least squares formulation to estimate the PSD tensors of order 4 from the data. We define a metric for the higher-order tensors and employ it for regularization across the lattice. Finally, performance of this model is depicted on synthetic data as well as real DW-MRI from an isolated rat hippocampus.
This research was in part funded by the NIH grants NS42075 & EB007082 to BCV, and in part by the University of Florida Alumni Fellowship to AB.
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Barmpoutis, A., Jian, B., Vemuri, B.C., Shepherd, T.M. (2007). Symmetric Positive 4th Order Tensors & Their Estimation from Diffusion Weighted MRI. In: Karssemeijer, N., Lelieveldt, B. (eds) Information Processing in Medical Imaging. IPMI 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4584. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73273-0_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73273-0_26
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