Characterizing Complex White Matter Structure from Cube & Sphere Diffusion Imaging with a Multi-Fiber Model (CUSP-MFM)

Benoit Scherrer¹, Simon K. Warfield¹

Multi-tensor models are of great interest for clinical applications because they enable the assessment of the white matter microstructure in addition to the brain connectivity. We propose a novel acquisition scheme and a novel fitting procedure for multi-fiber assessment. Our acquisition scheme combines spherical and cubic sampling. It enables multiple b-values to be acquired with low geometric and intensity distortion. Our optimization algorithm ensures spatially smooth and consistent positive definite tensors. We evaluate our CUSP-MFM (CUbe+SPhere Multi-Fiber Model) on both synthetic and clinical data. We demonstrate the ability of CUSP-MFM to characterize complex fiber structures from short duration acquisitions.