Increasing the realism of in silico cortex substrates for diffusion MRI simulation

International audience ; Numerical simulations have provided an interesting approach to study and validate brain microstructure models1. For this purpose, many methods to generate virtual brain cells have been proposed2,3,4. However, these methods focus only on the generation of substrates with specific brain cells of a given type. For example, generating a virtual scene populated only by axons2,3 or generating single neurons of multiple types4. To the best of our knowledge, no method was proposed to synthesize virtual microstructure scenes combining neurons with axons. This work aims to close the modeling gap of virtual brain microstructure by extending the MEDUSA framework5 to allow the generation of hybrid virtual substrates. The presented method allows the synthesis of volume of interests (VOIs) combining neurons with axons with similar volume fractions to values in the literature on human brain gray matter microstructure6.