Li-Wei Kuo1,
Justin P. Haldar2, Yu-Chun Lo3, Cheng-Liang Liu1,
Zhi-Pei Liang2, Wen-Yih Isaac Tseng1,4
1Center for Optoelectronic Biomedicine,
National Taiwan University College of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan; 2Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Beckman Institute, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, United States; 3Institute
of Biomedical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; 4Department
of Medical Imaging, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan
Noise
contamination is a significant problem in diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI)
tractography, and previous work has proposed a statistical denoising
algorithm to mitigate the effects of low signal-to-noise ratio. In this work,
improvements to fiber orientation accuracy due to denoising were quantified
using a systematic analysis of angular precision and dispersion metrics.
Results show that the proposed denoising method significantly improves
angular precision and dispersion.
Furthermore, the tractography results demonstrate better
reconstruction of white-matter structures using the denoised data. Future
work will use the proposed denoising algorithm to improve spatial resolution
and reduce scan time.
Keywords