An important problem of the analysis of fMRI experiments is to achieve some noise reduction of the data without blurring the shape of the activation areas. As a novel solution to this problem, the Propagation-Separation approach (PS), a structure adaptive smoothing method, has been proposed recently. PS adapts to different shapes of activation areas by generating a spatial structure corresponding to similarities and differences between time series in adjacent locations. In this paper we demonstrate how this method results in more accurate localization of brain activity. First, it is shown in numerical simulations that PS is superior over Gaussian smoothing with respect to the accurate description of the shape of activation clusters and and results in less false detections. Second, in a study of 37 presurgical planning cases we found that PS and Gaussian smoothing often yield different results, and we present examples showing aspects of the superiority of PS as applied to presurgical planning.
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
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging inherently involves noisy measurements and a severe multiple test
problem. Smoothing is usually used to reduce the effective number of multiple
comparisons and to locally integrate the signal and hence increase the
signal-to-noise ratio. Here, we provide a new structural adaptive segmentation
algorithm (AS)
that naturally combines the signal detection with noise reduction in one procedure.
Moreover, the new method
is closely related to a recently proposed structural adaptive smoothing
algorithm and preserves shape and spatial extent of activation areas without
blurring the borders.
Modeling the orientation distribution function by mixtures of angular central Gaussian distributions
(2010)
In this paper we develop a tensor mixture model for diffusion weighted imaging
data using an automatic model selection criterion for the order of tensor
components in a voxel. We show that the weighted orientation distribution
function for this model can be expanded into a mixture of angular central
Gaussian distributions. We show properties of this model in extensive
simulations and in a high angular resolution experimental data set. The results
suggest that the model may improve imaging of cerebral fiber tracts. We
demonstrate how inference on canonical model parameters may give rise to new
clinical applications.
Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data is characterized by a high noise level. Thus,
estimation errors of quantities like anisotropy indices or the main diffusion direction
used for fiber tracking are relatively large and may significantly confound the accuracy
of DTI in clinical or neuroscience applications. Besides pulse sequence optimization,
noise reduction by smoothing the data can be pursued as a complementary approach
to increase the accuracy of DTI. Here, we suggest an anisotropic structural adaptive
smoothing procedure, which is based on the Propagation-Separation method and preserves
the structures seen in DTI and their different sizes and shapes. It is applied
to artificial phantom data and a brain scan. We show that this method significantly
improves the quality of the estimate of the diffusion tensor and hence enables one
either to reduce the number of scans or to enhance the input for subsequent analysis
such as fiber tracking.
We introduce an algorithm for
diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging data enhancement based on structural adaptive smoothing in both space and diffusion direction.
The method, called POAS, does not refer to a specific model for the data, like the diffusion tensor or higher order models.
It works by embedding the measurement space into a space with defined metric and group operations, in this case the Lie group of three-dimensional Euclidean motion SE(3).
Subsequently, pairwise comparisons of the values of the diffusion
weighted signal are used for adaptation.
The position-orientation adaptive smoothing preserves the edges of the observed fine and anisotropic structures.
The POAS-algorithm is designed to reduce noise directly in the diffusion weighted images and consequently also to reduce bias and
variability of quantities derived from the data for specific models.
We evaluate the algorithm on simulated and experimental data and demonstrate that it can be used to reduce the number of applied diffusion gradients and
hence acquisition time while achieving similar quality of data, or to improve the quality of data acquired in a clinically feasible scan time setting.