Reconstruction of scattered data in fetal diffusion MRI

Abstract

In this paper we present a method for reconstructing D-MRI data on regular grids from sparse data without assuming specific diffusion models. This is particularly important when studying the fetal brain in utero, since registration methods applied for movement and distortion correction produce scattered data in spatial and angular (gradient) domains. We propose the use of a groupwise registration method, and a dual spatio-angular interpolation by using radial basis functions (RBF). Experiments performed on adult data showed a high accuracy of the method when estimating diffusion images in unavailable directions. The application to fetal data showed an improvement in the quality of the sequences according to criteria based on fractional anisotropy (FA) maps, and differences in the tractography results. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.