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Abstract #0573

Estimating the Number of Fiber Orientations in Diffusion MRI Voxels: A Constrained Spherical Deconvolution Study

Ben Jeurissen1, Alexander Leemans2, Jacques-Donald Tournier3, Derek K. Jones4, Jan Sijbers1

1Visionlab, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium; 2Image Sciences Institute, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands; 3Brain Research Institute, Florey Neuroscience Institutes (Austin), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; 4CUBRIC, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom


Recent advances of high angular resolution diffusion imaging allow the extraction of multiple fiber orientations per voxel and have spawned an interest for classification of voxels by the number of fiber orientations. In this work, we estimated the number of fiber orientations within each voxel using the constrained spherical deconvolution method with the residual bootstrap approach. We showed that multiple-fiber profiles arise consistently in various regions of the human brain where complex tissue structure is known to exist. Moreover, we detect voxels with more than two fiber orientations and detect a much higher proportion of multi-fiber voxels than previously reported.