Bennett Allan Landman1,2, Hanlin Wan2,3,
John A. Bogovic3, Peter C. M. van Zijl, 2,4,
Pierre-Louis Bazin5, Jerry L. Prince, 2,3
1Electrical Engineering, Vanderbilt
University, Nashville, TN, United States; 2Biomedical Engineering,
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States; 3Electrical
and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United
States; 4F.M. Kirby Center, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore,
MD, United States; 5Radiology, Johns Hopkins University,
Baltimore, MD, United States
Q-ball
imaging offers the potential to resolve the DTI crossing-fiber problem by
acquiring additional diffusion sensitized scans. Yet, practical constraints
limit its widespread adaptation in clinical research. Recently, compressed
sensing has characterized regions of crossing fibers using traditional DTI
data (i.e., low b-value, 30 directions). Here, we compare q-ball and
compressed sensing in simulated and in vivo crossing-fibers. Compressed
sensing estimates intra-voxel structure with greater reliability than
traditional q-ball while using only 13% of the scan time. Hence, compressed
sensing has the potential to enable clinical study of intra-voxel structure
for studies that have hitherto been limited to tensor analysis.
Keywords