Diffusion Imaging and Tractography on a Hardware Model of the Human Optic Chiasm

Wilhelmus LPM Pullens¹, Alard Roebroeck¹, Rainer Goebel¹

The human optic chiasm is an interesting, complex fiber structure, hard to image in vivo. Based on the anatomy, a DW-MRI phantom was constructed, offering the possibility to quantify tractography results, with little limits on imaging time, and it does not suffer from motion or cardiac pulsation artifacts. A detailed analysis of Constrained Spherical Deconvolution and tensor reconstructions was done, as well as quantitative (probabilistic) fiber tracking. These phantoms form ideal test objects to improve and validate imaging and quantitative DW-MRI tractography on complex fiber structures such as the optic chiasm.