Abstract #0771

Estimation of White Matter Fiber Orientations with the Funk-Radon and Cosine Transform

Justin P. Haldar¹, David W. Shattuck², Richard M. Leahy¹

¹Signal and Image Processing Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States; ²Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Tractography methods depend on estimating orientation distribution functions (ODFs) from diffusion MRI data. This work evaluates the performance of a new ODF estimation method known as the Funk-Radon and Cosine Transform (FRACT). The FRACT is a linear transformation technique for spherically-sampled q-space data that generalizes the previous Funk-Radon Transform (FRT). It estimates the constant solid angle ODF, can be characterized theoretically, can be computed efficiently, and substantially outperforms the FRT. This work compares the FRACT to existing ODF estimation methods with simulated and real data. Results demonstrate that the FRACT can be a powerful tool for MR tractography applications.