NEURONAL WHITE MATTER PARCELLATION USING SPATIALLY COHERENT NORMALIZED CUTS

Proc IEEE Int Symp Biomed Imaging. 2011:2061-2065. doi: 10.1109/ISBI.2011.5872818.

Abstract

This work presents an automated method for partitioning neuronal white matter (WM) into regions of interest with uniform WM architecture. These regions can then be used to replace atlas-derived regions for any subsequent statistical analysis. The fiber orientation distribution function is used as a model of WM architecture resulting in a voxel similarity function sensitive to both fiber orientations and configurations. The method utilizes the normalized cuts algorithm to partition WM voxels based on this similarity function along with a connected component labeling algorithm to ensure spatial compactness. We illustrate the algorithms ability to discern regions based on both orientation and complexity through its application to a simulated fiber crossing and an in-vivo dataset.