Riemannian graph diffusion for DT-MRI regularization

Abstract

A new method for diffusion tensor MRI (DT-MRI) regularization is presented that relies on graph diffusion. We represent a DT image using a weighted graph, where the weights of edges are functions of the geodesic distances between tensors. Diffusion across this graph with time is captured by the heat-equation, and the solution, i.e. the heat kernel, is found by exponentiating the Laplacian eigen-system with time. Tensor regularization is accomplished by computing the Riemannian weighted mean using the heat kernel as its weights. The method can efficiently remove noise, while preserving the fine details of images. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets illustrate the effectiveness of the method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.