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This paper investigates a data assimilation approach for non-invasive quantification of intracranial pressure from partial displacement data, acquired through magnetic resonance elastography. Data assimilation is based on a parametrized-background data weak methodology, in which the state of the physical system tissue displacements and pressure fields is reconstructed from partially available data assuming an underlying poroelastic biomechanics model. For this purpose, a physics-informed manifold is built by sampling the space of parameters describing the tissue model close to their physiological ranges, to simulate the corresponding poroelastic problem, and compute a reduced basis. Displacements and pressure reconstruction is sought in a reduced space after solving a minimization problem that encompasses both the structure of the reduced-order model and the available measurements. The proposed pipeline is validated using synthetic data obtained after simulating the poroelastic mechanics on a physiological brain. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the framework can exhibit accurate joint reconstructions of both displacement and pressure fields. The methodology can be formulated for an arbitrary resolution of available displacement data from pertinent images. It can also inherently handle uncertainty on the physical parameters of the mechanical model by enlarging the physics-informed manifold accordingly. Moreover, the framework can be used to characterize, in silico, biomarkers for pathological conditions, by appropriately training the reduced-order model. A first application for the estimation of ventricular pressure as an indicator of abnormal intracranial pressure is shown in this contribution.

Attempts for in-vivo histology require a high spatial resolution that comes with the price of a decreased signal-to-noise ratio. We present a novel iterative and multi-scale smoothing method for quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data that yield proton density, apparent transverse and longitudinal relaxation, and magnetization transfer maps. The method is based on the propagation-separation approach. The adaptivity of the procedure avoids the inherent bias from blurring subtle features in the calculated maps that is common for non-adaptive smoothing approaches. The characteristics of the methods were evaluated on a high-resolution data set (500 mym isotropic) from a single subject and quantified on data from a multi-subject study. The results show that the adaptive method is able to increase the signal-to-noise ratio in the calculated quantitative maps while largely avoiding the bias that is otherwise introduced by spatially blurring values across tissue borders. As a consequence, it preserves the intensity contrast between white and gray matter and the thin cortical ribbon.

In this paper we consider the adaptive '1-penalized estimators for the precision matrix in a finite-sample setting. We show consistency results and construct confidence intervals for the elements of the true precision matrix. Additionally, we analyze the bias of these confidence intervals. We apply the estimator to the estimation of functional connectivity networks in functional Magnetic Resonance data and elaborate the theoretical results in extensive simulation experiments.

Noise is a common issue for all Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques and obviously leads to variability of the estimates in any model describing the data. A number of special MR sequences as well as increasing spatial resolution in MR experiments further diminish the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). However, with low SNR the expected signal deviates from its theoretical value. Common modeling approaches therefore lead to a bias in estimated model parameters. Adjustments require an analysis of the data generating process and a characterization of the resulting distribution of the imaging data. We provide an adequate quasi-likelihood approach that employs these characteristics. We elaborate on the effects of typical data preprocessing and analyze the bias effects related to low SNR for the example of the diffusion tensor model in diffusion MRI. We then demonstrate that the problem is relevant even for data from the Human Connectome Project, one of the highest quality diffusion MRI data available so far.

In this article we present a noise reduction method (msPOAS) for multi-shell diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance data. To our knowledge, this is the first smoothing method which allows simultaneous smoothing of all q-shells. It is applied directly to the diffusion weighted data and consequently allows subsequent analysis by any model. Due to its adaptivity, the procedure avoids blurring of the inherent structures and preserves discontinuities. MsPOAS extends the recently developed position-orientation adaptive smoothing (POAS) procedure to multi-shell experiments. At the same time it considerably simplifies and accelerates the calculations. The behavior of the algorithm msPOAS is evaluated on diffusion-weighted data measured on a single shell and on multiple shells.

Diffusion weighted imaging is a magnetic resonance based method to investigate tissue micro-structure especially in the human brain via water diffusion. Since the standard diffusion tensor model for the acquired data failes in large portion of the brain voxel more sophisticated models have bee developed. Here, we report on the package dti and how some of these models can be used with the package.

Increasing the spatial resolution in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) inherently lowers the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In order to still detect functionally significant activations in high-resolution images, spatial smoothing of the data is required. However, conventional non-adaptive smoothing comes with a reduced effective resolution, foiling the benefit of the higher acquisition resolution. We show how our recently proposed structural adaptive smoothing procedure for functional MRI data can improve signal detection of high-resolution fMRI experiments regardless of the lower SNR. The procedure is evaluated on human visual and sensory-motor mapping experiments. In these applications, the higher resolution could be fully utilized and high-resolution experiments were outperforming normal resolution experiments by means of both statistical significance and information content.

The paper introduces and discusses different estimation methods for multi index models where the indices are parametric and the link function is nonparametric. More specific, the here introduced methods follow the idea of Hristache et al. (2001), modify and try to improve it. Moreover, they constitute alternatives to the so called MAVE-based methods (Xia et al, 2002). We concentrate on an intuitive presentation of what each procedure is doing to the data and its implementation. All methods considered here we have made freely available in R. We conclude with a comparative simulation study based on the provided package EDR.