International Journal of Computer Science Issues

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This paper describes image processing techniques for Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance. In Diffusion Tensor MRI, a tensor describing local water diffusion is acquired for each voxel. The geometric nature of the diffusion tensors can quantitatively characterize the local structure in tissues such as bone, muscles, and white matter of the brain. The close relationship between local image structure and apparent diffusion makes this image modality very interesting for medical image analysis. We present a decomposition of the diffusion tensor based on its symmetry properties resulting in useful measures describing the geometry of the diffusion ellipsoid. A simple anisotropy measure follows naturally from this analysis. We describe how the geometry, or shape, of the tensor can be visualized using a coloring scheme based on the derived shape measures. We show how filtering of the tensor data of a human brain can provide a description of macro structural diffusion which can be used for measures of fiber-tract organization. We also describe how tracking of white matter tracts can be implemented using the introduced methods. These methods offers unique tools for the in vivo demonstration of neural connectivity in healthy and diseased brain tissue.