A survey of illustrative visualization techniques for diffusion-weighted MRI tractography

Abstract

Fiber tracking is a common method for analyzing 3D tensor fields that arise from diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging. This method can visualize, e.g., the structure of the brain’s white matter or that of muscle tissue. Fiber tracking results in dense, line-based datasets that are often too large to understand when shown directly. This chapter provides a survey of recent illustrative visualization approaches that address this problem. We group this work into techniques that improve the depth perception of fiber tracts, techniques that visualize additional data about the tracts, techniques that employ focus+context visualization, visualizations of fiber tract bundles, representations of uncertainty in the context of probabilistic fiber tracking, and techniques that rely on a spatially abstracted visualization of connectivity.