Demian Wassermann1, Julien Cohen-Hadad2,3,
Stephane Lehericy4, Habib Benali5, Serge Rossignol6,
Rachid Deriche1
1INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, PACA, France,
Metropolitan; 2Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical
Imaging, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA,, Charleston, MA,
United States; 3UMRS 678, Laboratoire d'Imagerie Fonctionnelle,
Inserm, UPMC Univ Paris 06, Paris, Ile-de-France, France, Metropolitan; 4Center
for NeuroImaging Research, Pitie Salpetriere Hospital, UPMC Univ Paris 06,
Paris, Ile-de-France, France; 5Inserm, UPMC Univ Paris 06, UMRS
678, Laboratoire d'Imagerie Fonctionnelle, Paris, Ile-de-France, France; 6Groupe
de recherche sur le Systme Nerveux Central, Dpartement de Physiologie,
Universit de Montral, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Spinal
Cord MRI (SC-MRI) is a challenging research field with numerous important
clinical and basic research applications. Some of the SC-MRI applications
strongly need to deal with a well
straightened spinal cord either for appropriate methodological
developments, for better visualization or diagnostic purposes. In this
article, we develop an efficient and automatic method to straighten the
spinal cord image and fibres. Diffusion Tensor MRI is first used to recover
by tractography the bundles of fibres related to the spinal cord. An
efficient Gaussian process framework is then used to automatically recover in
a robust way the most representative fibre which is used to interpolate and
straighten the spinal cord image and fibres. Our method is successfully
tested on real images of one cat with partial spinal cord injury and two
healthy volunteers. This capability to reliably reconstruct straightened animal
and human spinal cord opens new opportunities for SC-MRI applications.
Keywords