Diffusion-tensor tractography is used to quantify functionally relevant muscle architectural variables, including fiber tract length, orientation, and curvature. However, image noise and artifacts cause positional errors in the fiber tracking points and may cause tracts to terminate prematurely. The effect of the points’ positional errors on estimates of muscle fiber curvature can be mitigated through the use of polynomial fitting. Here we test several approaches for smoothing the spatial field of polynomial fitting coefficients and reconstructing missing or shortened-length fiber tracts. We show that median filtering of the polynomial coefficients retains additional fiber tracts without altering the median architectural properties.
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