A Novel framework for high order tensor-based diffusivity profile estimation

Other conference contribution, 2013

High order tensors (HOTs) are used to model the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) profile of water at each voxel in (brain) tissue. In this paper we propose : (i) A new method for estimating HOTs from diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI) data based on weighted least squares (WLS) optimization; and (ii) A new expression for computing the fractional anisotropy from a HOT that does not suffer from singularities and spurious zeros. We also present an empirical evaluation of the proposed method relative to the two existing methods based on both synthetic and real human brain dMRI data. The results show that the proposed method yields more accurate estimation than the competing methods.