Estimating Tissue Microstructure with Undersampled Diffusion Data via Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Advanced diffusion models for tissue microstructure are widely employed to study brain disorders. However, these models usually require diffusion MRI (DMRI) data with densely sampled q-space, which is prohibitive in clinical settings. This problem can be resolved by using deep learning techniques, which learn the mapping between sparsely sampled q-space data and the high-quality diffusion microstructural indices estimated from densely sampled data. However, most existing methods simply view the input DMRI data as a vector without considering data structure in the q-space. In this paper, we propose to overcome this limitation by representing DMRI data using graphs and utilizing graph convolutional neural networks to estimate tissue microstructure. Our method makes full use of the q-space angular neighboring information to improve estimation accuracy. Experimental results based on data from the Baby Connectome Project demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.