Fast Fiber Orientation Estimation in Diffusion MRI from kq-Space Sampling and Anatomical Priors

High spatio-angular resolution diffusion MRI (dMRI) has been shown to provide accurate identification of complex neuronal fiber configurations, albeit, at the cost of long acquisition times. We propose a method to recover intra-voxel fiber configurations at high spatio-angular resolution relying on...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Marica Pesce, Audrey Repetti, Anna Auría, Alessandro Daducci, Jean-Philippe Thiran, Yves Wiaux
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-10-01
Series:Journal of Imaging
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2313-433X/7/11/226
Description
Summary:High spatio-angular resolution diffusion MRI (dMRI) has been shown to provide accurate identification of complex neuronal fiber configurations, albeit, at the cost of long acquisition times. We propose a method to recover intra-voxel fiber configurations at high spatio-angular resolution relying on a 3D kq-space under-sampling scheme to enable accelerated acquisitions. The inverse problem for the reconstruction of the fiber orientation distribution (FOD) is regularized by a <i>structured sparsity</i> prior promoting simultaneously voxel-wise sparsity and spatial smoothness of fiber orientation. Prior knowledge of the spatial distribution of white matter, gray matter, and cerebrospinal fluid is also leveraged. A minimization problem is formulated and solved via a stochastic forward–backward algorithm. Simulations and real data analysis suggest that accurate FOD mapping can be achieved from severe kq-space under-sampling regimes potentially enabling high spatio-angular resolution dMRI in the clinical setting.
ISSN:2313-433X