1. Fiber-Flux Diffusion Density for White Matter Tracts Analysis: Application to Mild Anomalies Localization in Contact Sports Players
- Author
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Benou, Itay, Veksler, Ronel, Friedman, Alon, and Raviv, Tammy Riklin
- Subjects
FOS: Computer and information sciences ,Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) ,FOS: Biological sciences ,Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition ,Quantitative Biology - Quantitative Methods ,Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM) - Abstract
We present the concept of fiber-flux density for locally quantifying white matter (WM) fiber bundles. By combining scalar diffusivity measures (e.g., fractional anisotropy) with fiber-flux measurements, we define new local descriptors called Fiber-Flux Diffusion Density (FFDD) vectors. Applying each descriptor throughout fiber bundles allows along-tract coupling of a specific diffusion measure with geometrical properties, such as fiber orientation and coherence. A key step in the proposed framework is the construction of an FFDD dissimilarity measure for sub-voxel alignment of fiber bundles, based on the fast marching method (FMM). The obtained aligned WM tract-profiles enable meaningful inter-subject comparisons and group-wise statistical analysis. We demonstrate our method using two different datasets of contact sports players. Along-tract pairwise comparison as well as group-wise analysis, with respect to non-player healthy controls, reveal significant and spatially-consistent FFDD anomalies. Comparing our method with along-tract FA analysis shows improved sensitivity to subtle structural anomalies in football players over standard FA measurements.
- Published
- 2017