MesoFT: Unifying diffusion modelling and fiber tracking

Abstract

One overarching challenge of clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is to quantify tissue structure at the cellular scale of micrometers, based on an MRI acquisition with a millimeter resolution. Diffusion MRI (dMRI) provides the strongest sensitivity to the cellular structure. However, interpreting dMRI measurements has remained a highly ill-posed inverse problem. Here we propose a framework that resolves the above challenge for human white matter fibers, by unifying intra-voxel mesoscopic modeling with global fiber tractography. Our algorithm is based on a Simulated Annealing approach which simultaneously optimizes diffusion parameters and fiber locations. Each fiber carries its individual set of diffusion parameters which allows to link them by their structural relationships. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.