Oriented Tensor Reconstruction: Tracing Neural Pathways from Diffusion Tensor MRI

Figure 1: Human brain pathways recovered from DT-MRI data using the oriented tensor reconstruction algorithm In this paper we develop a new technique for tracing anatomical fibers from 3D tensor fields. The technique extracts salient tensor features using a local regularization technique that allows the algo-rithm to cross noisy regions and bridge gaps in the data. We applied the method to human brain DT-MRI data and recovered identifiable anatomical structures that correspond to the white matter brain-fiber pathways. The images in this paper are derived from a dataset hav-ing 121x88x60 resolution. We were able to recover fibers with less than the voxel size resolution by applying the regularization tech-nique, i.e., using a priori assumptions about fiber smoothness. The regularization procedure is done through a moving least squares fil-ter directly incorporated in the tracing algorithm.