Global fiber tracking: Incorporation of the cell size and the development of a novel imaging technology unifying the ideas of the q-space and the DTI

The nerve fiber trace may serve as
crucial information for exploiting the
relationship between the brain structure and
the brain function and for the clinical
diagnosis. Conventionally, acquiring this
information usually needs to rely on invasive
means. As contrast, the diffusion tensor
magnetic resonance imaging (DTI) is
nowadays the most prevailing approach to
observe in vivo nerve fibers in the white
matter noninvasively. Nevertheless,
because of the noise and the inherent
characteristics of the DTI that cannot
differentiate crossover nerve fibers, those
previous fiber tracking algorithms based on
the ideas of local optimization all fail to find
the reasonable nerve fiber traces from the
DTI images. In the first year of the
two-year project, we have developed a global
fiber tracking algorithm, which not only has
an excellent noise-immune ability, but also
can further include the cell-size information.
Keywords: Fiber Tracking, Diffusion Tensor
Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Q-space, Cell
Size of Nerve Fiber, Global Optimization