Atlas based segmentation of white matter fiber bundles in DTMRI using fractional anisotropy and principal eigen vectors

Abstract

In this work, we develop an atlas based method for automatic segmentation of white matter fiber bundles. To this end, we propose a new method for registration of diffusion tensor (DT) images using DTI information which is also used in the fiber tracking process, and we also propose a strategy for segmenting the fiber bundles using the new registration method and a probabilistic white matter atlas. We apply the registration method to 13 real DTI data sets and evaluate the results by comparing the level of alignment of all fibers. Then, we use the proposed strategy to segment 10 major fiber bundles in one of the subjects. One of the advantages of such a method is the robustness of the results thanks to using prior knowledge. The segmented results can be used for comparing and evaluating other fiber bundle segmentation methods.