Slice-based Visualization of Brain Fiber Bundles - A LIC-based Approach

摘要

The reconstruction of brain fibers from diffusion MRI data is a widely studied field. There is a great variety of algorithms to generate fiber tracts. Despite the many possibilities to create fiber tractograms, it is not very common within the medical community to make use of them. We think there are two reasons why the acceptance of this technique is so low. The first reason is that most time the degree of detail provided by singular fibers is neither justified nor needed. Second, within the medical domain tractography visualization is still uncommon. To solve the first problem it is common to apply clustering algorithms which aggregate the single fibers to fiber bundles. In this paper, we display the fiber bundles within slices. The presentation within slices is common within the medical community and very intuitive to examine. Furthermore, our visualization allows the spatial assignment of fiber bundles to the brain structure provided as T1 images. Among many neuroscientists and physicians, T1 images are the main source for spatial orientation within the brain.