Fiber orientation distribution function from non-negative sparse recovery with quantitative analysis of local fiber orientations and tractography using DW-MRI datasets

Diffusion weighted MRI (DW-MRI) is the unique non-invasive imaging modality capable of estimating in vivo the structure of the white matter. In this paper, we propose, evaluate and validate a new DW-MRI method to model and recover high quality tractogram even with multiple fiber populations in a voxel and from a limited number of acquisitions. Our method relies on the estimation of the Fiber Orientation Distribution (FOD) function, parameterized as a non-negative sum of rank-1 tensors and the use of a non-negative sparse recovery scheme to efficiently recover the tensors, and their number. Each fiber population of a voxel is characterized by the orientation and the weight of a rank-1 tensor. Using both deterministic and probabilistic tractography algorithms, we show that our method is able to accurately reconstruct narrow crossing fibers and obtain a high quality connectivity reconstruction even from a limited number of acquisitions. To this end, a validation scheme based on the connectivity recovered from tractography is developed to quantitatively evaluate and analyze the performance of our method. The tractometer tool is used to quantify the tractography obtained from a simulated DW-MRI dataset including a high angular resolution dataset of 60 gradient directions and a dataset of 30 gradient directions, each of them corrupted with Rician noise of SNR 10 and 20. The performance of our FOD model and its impact on the tractography results are also demonstrated and illustrated on in vivo DW-MRI datasets with high and low angular resolutions.