DIFFUSION TENSOR MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING INCLUDING LOCAL WEIGHTED INTERPOLATION

摘要

An imaging method (150, 190) for imaging a subject (16) including fibrous or anisotropic structures (102) includes acquiring a three-dimensional apparent diffusion tensor map (162) of a region with some anisotropic structures (102). The apparent diffusion tensor at a voxel is processed (164) to obtain eigenvectors (e₁, e₂, e₃) and eigenvalues (&lgr;₁, &lgr;₂, &lgr;₃). A three-dimensional fiber representation (208) is extracted (198, 200) using the eigenvectors and eigenvalues. During the extracting (198, 200), voxels are locally interpolated (202) in at least a selected dimension in a vicinity of the fiber representation (208). The interpolating includes weighting the voxels by a parameter indicative of a local anisotropy. The interpolating results in a three-dimensional fiber representation (208) having a higher tracking accuracy and representation resolution than the acquired tensor map (162).